


The Summoning of Nikola Price

by alienqueequeg



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, Bedsharing, F/M, Haunted House, Horror, Hurt/Comfort, Jealousy, MSR, Mutual Pining, Possession, Psychological Horror, Psychosexual Horror, UST to RST, gothic horror, seance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-20
Updated: 2019-10-31
Packaged: 2020-12-24 05:17:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 23,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21094025
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alienqueequeg/pseuds/alienqueequeg
Summary: Mulder and Scully spend a weekend in a haunted house with psychics attempting to communicate with the ghost of powerful spiritualist. Set sometime after One Son and before Milagro.Content warning for murder-suicide (think: How the Ghosts Stole Christmas), infertility mentions and Scully pain





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JuliaJMD](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JuliaJMD/gifts).

Price House  
Pennsylvania  
1969

Simon swallowed the last bite of cherry pie and slapped the table with two open palms. The sound made Natalie jump.

“You really outdid yourself this time,” he told his wife.

“You think so?” Natalie gave him a rare smile for a rare, sunny afternoon in December.

“It’s heaven on a fork.” He leaned back in his chair, appraising the table setting. Even though it was only lunch, she’d brought out the good silver for the occasion. Crystal glasses that rarely saw daylight cast prisms on the tablecloth.

“Seconds?” Natalie asked.

“Hell, put me down for thirds.”

Simon grabbed her wrist as she stood, reaching for the knife in the pie dish, smeared with cherry filling.

“You look like you’re feeling better today,” he said softly.

“I’m sorry I’ve been so spaced out lately.” Natalie shook his hand off, not meeting his eyes as she cut the slice and slid it on his plate.

“It’s understandable. With everything that’s been going on. The move and the house and…” He couldn’t finish the sentence. They’d agreed never to talk about _that_, though Simon was starting to wonder if their silence wasn’t contributing to Natalie’s behavior. The insomnia, the sleepwalking, the times he caught her muttering to herself like she was responding to a voice only she could hear. When he’d felt certain it wasn’t Natalie staring back at him.

He couldn’t talk to anyone about what had been going on with his wife. His friends were all miles away, and it wasn’t a conversation to have over the phone. Besides, he knew what they’d say. What did they expect, moving into a house like that? How many times had he and Natalie—committed atheists that they were—rolled their eyes at the warnings?

Tears started streaming down his wife’s face.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?”

The moment the words left his mouth, an excruciating pain split his head without preamble. He doubled over, clutching his temples.

His wife watched him, unsurprised. She sat very still, tears spilling onto her lap.

Simon’s throat was dry. He tried to reach for his water, but his vision started to split and waver. He knocked the glass over with the back of his hand, only dimly aware of the pool of water spilling across the table and dripping on the floor.

“What’s happening to me?” His lungs were constricted, and he realized his body had started hyperventilating. He couldn’t get enough air.

He didn’t know what was worse, the searing pain like nothing he’d ever experienced or the way his wife was looking at him. She knew. Whatever was happening to him, she’d caused it.

“Ambulance,” he gasped. “Call 911.”

“It’s okay, baby,” she said in that low voice that had soothed him through so many dark nights. “It will be over soon.”

Natalie took another bite from her own half-eaten piece of pie.

“What did you—” He couldn’t finish the sentence. Vomit poured out of his mouth, over his plate and the surrounding tablecloth.

“We’re going to be together forever,” she said.

_I know_, he wanted to say. _That’s why we got married._ But his mouth couldn’t form words. His muscles were no longer responding to his commands.

Natalie didn’t take her eyes off him as she ate. He could barely hear the sound of her fork against the china as the blood rushed in his ears. When she finished, she took her hand in his, threading their fingers together.

“I love you, Simon.”

He was dying. The pain was telling him that his body was irrevocably broken; there was no other explanation. His vision was darkening, and he could no longer see out of the corner of his eyes.

He wanted to tell her to call an ambulance, that it wasn’t too late, that it didn’t need to end like that. Even if he could form the words, he knew it was over.

His wife’s face was as red as the cherry pie that was killing them both. Her face split into a wide grin, and her breathing was rapid. Her eyes turned up to the ceiling, exalted.

He collapsed, his cheek hitting the plate of regurgitated pie. As his vision turned black, all he could see were their hands clasped together, wedding rings sparkling in the afternoon sunlight.

* * *

FBI Headquarters

1999

“Spill it,” Scully snapped, dropping her pen on the desk. She blew on her signature before closing the report.

“Hmm?” Mulder’s attention was fixed on the pencil dancing between his fingers.

“What’s on your mind?”

“My mind?” he stalled.

“You’ve been distracted all day. Let’s hear it.”

After hours of avoiding eye contact, his gaze pinned her. She attempted to match his intensity and raised an eyebrow.

“So…” she prompted. Like the pencil poised between his long fingers, he’d been spinning her since she arrived for work that morning. She was tired of being spun.

It was damn hot in the office, and that did nothing to improve her mood. The Hoover Building had a tendency to overcompensate for cold weather. Heat rose, but the laws of physics rarely applied in their basement office. Scully sweltered in black wool. Mulder had abandoned his tie and jacket hours ago. With his sleeves rolled up, he was irritatingly unfazed.

She reached under her chair to tug at her nylons, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

He noticed. He always noticed.

He leaned back in his chair, studying her. “Scully, what are you doing two weekends from now?”

“I’ve learned not to make plans that far ahead.” Her words came out more barbed than she’d intended. “Why?”

“Sage Starling will be in Pennsylvania.”

“Am I supposed to know who that is?”

“Sage Starling!” he exclaimed, as though that were explanation enough. “World’s foremost psychic medium.”

“Again, I ask…”

“She’s the real deal, Scully.” He lowered his voice. “Tables shaking, apparitions materializing, automatic writing.”

“Sounds like quite the performance.”

“She’s communicated details about the dead it wouldn’t have been possible to know from a cold or warm reading. Family secrets buried so deep no one alive ever speaks of them.”

“So how were they able to substantiate them?”

Mulder breezed past that. “She’ll be performing a seance with some of her colleagues.”

“Parsley, Rosemary and Thyme?”

He snorted. “Anyway, we’ve been cordially invited to attend.”

“_We_?”

“Well, technically _I_ was invited,” he admitted. “But you are welcome to join me as my plus one.”

“What an honor.”

“Three days in an impeccably preserved historic house.” He waited for a reaction that wouldn’t come. “Meals fully covered. R&R in the beautiful Pennsylvania countryside.”

“Sounds too good to be true,” she said slowly.

“It’ll be like a weekend getaway. Bring a book. Bring two books!”

“And attend a seance.”

“Maybe you’ll learn a thing or two about psychic phenomena.”

“Six years with you has been an education enough.”

“So you can debunk the whole thing. Explain to me exactly how Sage Starling puts on her performance.” He slowed, going in for the kill. “C’mon, Scully. Prove me wrong.”

Her cheeks warmed, and she tried not to think of that other historic house, the woman she told herself she’d imagined. _Your only joy in life is proving him wrong._

“I know you, Mulder. Professional psychics are just about the only thing you don’t believe in. What aren’t you tell me?”

He grinned. “I thought you’d never ask.”

Mulder hopped to his feet, switched the lights off and flicked on the projector, the familiar hum filling the office. The flickering image of a black Victorian house appeared on the wall.

“Before it was the Price House, it was called the Steward House,” he intoned.

“Let me guess…A cursed house where countless souls have met a mysterious or improbable end.”

He gave her an appreciative look, and she raised an eyebrow.

With a click, the slide showed the face of a man with thick side mustache and deep hollows under his cheekbones.

“It was constructed in the late 1800s by a Philadelphia physician, Alfred Steward. His family had grown tired of the hustle and bustle of city life, so he took his wife and his six children to the tiny town of Covencliff in rural Pennsylvania. The town, which boasted only a few hundred residents at the time, had no local physician. He built his house a mile out of town, and he would ride into town to care for the residents, sometimes staying for days at a time, sleeping in his office.”

_Click_. Six children of various ages standing stiffly, staring into nothing. The mother’s hair was set in a fluffy halo around her head. She had rough, striking features—what would have been called handsome but not beautiful.

“His wife, Iris Steward, and their six children were all prone to insomnia and sensitive to light. To this day, it’s unclear if their fragile dispositions were of a physical or psychological origin. The house was built to accommodate their needs. If you notice—” He flicked the slides back to the beginning. “There are no windows on the third floor. This was intentional, as the family required total darkness to sleep.

“They lived there for many years, until one day, Alfred Steward returned home from almost a week in town dealing with a measles outbreak. What he saw was unimaginable…”

The next slide showed the interior of the house: a foyer opening up to a double staircase with a yonic curve, ornate brocades carved into every corner.

“You see, when Alfred Steward returned home, everyone in the house—his wife, his children, all their servants—were dead. As a physician, he was able to determine the cause of death from the state of their bodies. Botulism, probably from a batch of fig jam gone bad. The children used to pick the figs from a tree out back. He hanged himself on that very same tree.”

Mulder paused for effect.

“No one lived in that house for many years. It became the thing of local legend. People who visited the house reported hearing children playing.”

He switched to a slide of a tree with wooden swings hanging from a thick branch.

“They would see lights in the towers and figures passing through the windows. When the locals would check up on the house, they would sometimes find the bodies of squatters. It was unclear how long they’d been staying there before they met their demise. According to anyone you’d ask, the house was cursed. It was uninhabited for many years, until…”

_Click_. The next slide showed the portrait of a woman with hard, black eyes. Her dark hair framed her face in controlled waves, and her lips curled up in a sneer.

Something about the way the woman looked at the camera made Scully feel like she was being watched, though the notion was absurd. She adjusted her suit.

“Meet Nikola Price, Philadelphia’s most famous psychic medium in the early 20th century. She’d made a fortune doing seances in the city. But business slowed when spiritualism fell out of fashion. She wanted to retire somewhere quiet that would allow her to conduct more extensive research into the paranormal.

“Due to its sordid history, she was able to purchase the Steward House for virtually nothing. She kept the interior largely intact, though in her later days—when some believe she started to go mad—she removed all the belongings of the Steward family on the third floor and burned them in a giant bonfire outside the front of the house. The smoke could be seen from town for days. After that, her servants would find her sitting in the third-floor rooms in total darkness, perhaps in some kind of trance.”

_Click_. The image of several people in voluminous dresses and three-piece suits at a round table looking at a cluster of lit pillar candles. Behind them, floor to ceiling bookshelves.

“She would perform regular seances in the house. It was rumored she was a practitioner of sex magic, believing the veil between worlds grew thinner during orgasm.” Mulder paused to see if he would get a reaction, and Scully attempted to keep her face impassive. “She would bring both men and women into these orgiastic rituals, invoking the spirits to communicate while getting it on. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find any photos of _that_.”

“Did it work?” she asked drily.

His response was laced with innuendo when he replied, “Depends on who you ask.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “Nikola Price lived in this house until 1934, when she performed a seance for a man whose wife had recently taken her own life under suspicious circumstances. Price's body was found by a servant the next day, her throat slit. The man had cut his own wrists and bled out in front of the fire. The servant said she had heard strange noises and a struggle coming from the library, but that was hardly unusual. Everyone that worked in the house had operated under strict instructions never to open the library door when a session was taking place.”

“A murder-suicide?”

“It would seem so on the surface, but it might not be that simple.”

She gave him a “get to the point” look.

“Price used to talk about looking forward to the afterlife and communicating with the living. She believed she had an easier time getting in touch with the souls of murder victims as they were restless, and unwilling or unable to pass on to the other side.”

“So she may have provoked the man into murdering her?”

“To make her spirit more powerful from the beyond,” he finished.

_Click._ An image of Nikola Price holding the hands of two women by her side, her eyes rolled back in her head, exposing only the whites of her eyes.

Scully suppressed a shudder. There wasn’t a chance in hell she’d let Mulder see the story had gotten under her skin.


	2. Chapter 2

****Covencliff, Pennsylvania

Mulder’s spine prickled as he turned his car onto a narrow road that he knew led only to one house. In his head, Scully’s voice reminded him of the power of imagination and anticipation; she was unable to do the job herself, as she was fast asleep with her head resting on her seatbelt, her mouth slightly open.

But the air had a new electricity, and his bloodhound sense for weird shit had activated.

The trees bowed over the road, blotting out most of the remaining daylight. It had been a sunny day in front of a forecast of sunny days if the newspaper he’d picked up at Covencliff’s one-pump gas station was to be believed.

The car hit the gravel with a loud crunch, tires bouncing, a car-sized dust cloud kicked up in its wake. Scully let out a tiny moan as she stirred.

Mulder winced at the metallic scraping noise as his car dipped into a pothole. Scully gasped awake, visibly startled for only a second, the time it took to make sense of her surroundings. He smiled to himself as she wiped the corner of her mouth.

She turned her attention to the map spread open on her lap.

“No need. We’re almost there.” He was unable to hide the reverence in his voice as he stopped before a wrought-iron gate. It opened automatically, and Mulder was almost disappointed he didn’t get the opportunity to wrestle it, denying him the traditional haunted house rite of passage.

Scully finished folding the map just as the road took a sharp turn, and the behemoth Victorian appeared before them, a stark black silhouette against the setting sun. Spires rose from the roof to pierce the sky, and young vines made valiant attempts to climb the walls. The forest closed in from all sides, only a slender patch of grass between the house and the forest. The surrounding forest was dense. Woods to get lost in, not go for leisurely strolls.

He circled a dry fountain and parked behind a pair of sleek black Cadillacs.

Scully tumbled out like she’d been deprived of oxygen in the car with him. He looked away when she pushed out her chest to crack her back. She was wearing a clingy, slate blue sweater with a plunging neckline, and he was self-absorbed enough to believe she’d selected it deliberately to torture him. Or not. He doubted even a psychic could make sense of what was going on with their relationship.

Speak of the devil.

Sage Starling glided down the front steps. Scully coughed a little, composing herself.

Sage looked much the same as she had when he met her a couple years ago, though the tattoos dotting her temples and the esoteric symbols on the backs of her hands were new. She’d started to let the silver grow in naturally, and it gave a unique dimension to her chestnut brown hair.

Sage opened her arms wide. “I’m so glad you made it.”

Mulder tensed as she wrapped him in a warm hug, hoping she wouldn’t be nearly as handsy as she was the last time he’d seen her.

Still raw from Scully’s little Philadelphia adventure a couple years ago, they’d met at a conference and welcomed her attention. The flirtation continued over a few drinks at the hotel bar. Sage slipped him her room key and whispered the number in his ear. He’d spent hours on his bed, turning the key over in his hand, wondering why he couldn’t bring himself to get up. After checking the time and determining the window of opportunity had closed, he’d jerked off to pay-per-view and passed out.

He’d forgotten about the pungency of her essential oil perfume.

Scully cleared her throat.

“Is this your partner?” Sage asked, pulling back and shifting her attention. “I wasn’t expecting a woman.”

“I assure you there are lots of women in the FBI,” Scully said tersely.

“Of course there are. When he asked if he could bring his partner, I wasn’t thinking FBI partner.” Sage’s too-slow cadence had a way of making everything from her mouth vaguely condescending; he could feel Scully bristle.

Sage laughed at herself and shook Scully’s hand. There was something in the way she looked at Scully that made Mulder uneasy. It wasn’t like she was assessing her as a romantic threat—he could deal with that. No, it was something else. Excitement? The anticipation of a challenge?

Mulder pulled out their suitcases from the trunk and gave one final, longing look at the gun safe. He felt naked without his weapon, even though he knew Sage’s reasoning was sound when she insisted he didn’t bring it into the house. Scully had also deposited her Sig there, along with the case file for the last expedition to the Price House.

Sage didn’t offer to help them with their bags. They followed her up the stone front steps, watching as she pushed the mahogany front doors with effort.

A gust of stale air hit them, with it the smell of old wood and newspaper and dust. The photographs of the interior did nothing to prepare them for the real thing: the exquisitely carved staircases, the ornate gaslights fixed to the walls, the stained glass window above the front door that cast vivid colors across the room in the evening light. It reminded Mulder of Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, listening to the choir practice with his university friends, all half-stoned from a joint that spat with seeds. Scully touched her necklace, presumably drawing a similar comparison. She stiffened as the doors slammed shut behind them.

Sage beckoned them upstairs and down the hallway.

The bedroom was equally stunning: the lace canopy hanging from thick pillars around the bed, the gold-plated floral wallpaper, the delicate brocades carved into the wood at every opportunity.

“We only prepared the one room,” Sage explained. “As I said, I thought you were…together. We could clean up one of the other bedrooms if you’d like.”

Sage looked at him, silently asking a question he couldn’t answer.

Scully set her suitcase on the bed. “It’s fine.”

“I’m sure we could find a cot,” Sage offered.

“It’s fine,” Scully repeated more firmly.

Mulder regarded his partner with curiosity. On the road, she was always the loudest to complain when they were forced to share a room.

“I’ll let you two get settled.” Sage started to back out of the room. “Please join us in the dining hall when you are done. You’ll find it at the bottom of the stairs to the right. We’ve laid out some hors d ‘oeuvres and dinner will be served in an hour.”

She shut the door behind her.

“I wonder if she’s inked everywhere,” Mulder said absently as he pulled out his toiletry bag.

“I’m sure you could find out if you want.”

There was a nasty edge to her voice, and Mulder wished he hadn’t opened his mouth. But sometimes he couldn’t help himself. There was a sick comfort in knowing he could still get a reaction.

After they unpacked, he guided her back downstairs, his fingertips tracing the ouroboros under her top. Around and around they went.

* * *

Mulder held the door open, and Scully took a deep breath before entering, preparing herself to meet the people with which they would be spending the next several days. Sage was nowhere to be seen, but two women were seated around a fire, one deep in a book and the other frowning at a boxy laptop balanced over crossed legs. 

The enormity of the dining hall took her breath away. A banquet table stretched down most of the length of the room, leaving an expanse of hardwood that was probably used as a dance floor for parties in front of the living room area by the fire. On the other side, there was a breakfast nook. A round table sat in front of a curved window. If she remembered right, that’s where Simon and Natalie McCoy’s bodies were found.

“You must be the FBI agents.” The woman with the book had set it down, extending her hand to Scully’s. “I’m Luna.”

She had a long braid the circumference of Scully’s wrist that wrapped over her shoulder and fell down towards her stomach. Scully couldn’t fathom the length of it, the weight that must constantly tug at her head.

“We’re not here in any official capacity,” Scully replied, finding Luna’s hand warm and dry. “Dana Scully. Nice to meet you. This is my partner, Fox Mulder.”

“I’m so glad you came.” While Scully didn’t feel any ill-will from the woman, something told her she wasn’t telling the truth.

“Libby,” said someone to Scully’s left.

The voice was deep, and she hadn’t expected to look down at the person speaking; she rarely looked down at anyone. In her heeled boots, Scully had several inches on the tiny woman with cropped blue hair. She practically disappeared under her baggy jeans and plaid top.

“Nice to meet you,” she repeated, a sense of familiarity tugging at the back of her mind. “Libby Reese?”

Libby’s hair had been longer on the dust jacket—and purple—but her delicately pointed features were easily identifiable.

“That’s me.” Libby dug her hands in her pockets, looking up at her, confident and shy at the same time.

“_View from Above_ is one of the best nonfiction books I’ve read in years.”

Libby indulged Scully as she gushed about how much she’d loved the journalist’s exploration into the world of professional climbers. A consummate climber herself, Libby scaled sheer cliff faces with her subjects, culminating in her own free climb. No ropes, no equipment, just strong fingers keeping her from plunging to her death. Her account of it had taken Scully’s breath away, the pure challenge and danger of it.

Libby explained she was working on a new book about modern exploration into the afterlife. A chapter would be dedicated to the events of the weekend, and Scully should let her know if she had a pseudonym in mind.

“Fig?” They were interrupted by Mulder. Naturally, he’d made his way to the hors d ‘oeuvres and was eyeing a jar of fig spread next to the cheese plate. “Kinda morbid, don’t you think?”

Libby gave a low, genuine laugh that made Scully like her even more. “Sylvia put that out for us. You’d have to ask her if it was intentional. My money’s on ‘yes.’”

“Sylvia?”

“I’m sure she’ll introduce herself later. She’s hard at work making our dinner right now.” Libby nodded toward the door at the end of the room and leaned in confidentially. “Every haunted house needs an unpleasant older woman to feed us and deliver cryptic warnings.”

Scully snickered. “Did you get one of those?”

“Not yet. I’ve got my fingers crossed for _nightfall_.” She delivered the final word with a dramatic flourish.

Scully opened her mouth to respond, but their attentions were diverted. A car making alarming lurching noises was pulling around the driveway. It came to a screeching halt.

“That would be Craig,” Luna said tightly.

They all stopped to listen as the car door slammed shut and then the front door, followed by muttered curses about the “fucking house.”

Craig Donnelly was at least fifty pounds heavier than he was in his mugshot. The webs of broken capillaries on his cheeks were new, too, and he had a sour, chemical smell.

Craig scowled at the group. “What the fuck are you staring at?” he asked by way of introduction.

* * *

Mulder’s jeans had tightened around his waist by the time they said their goodnights and left the dining hall. Sylvia was as brusque and unpleasant as they’d been warned, but she made a hell of a smoked brisket. Mulder went back for seconds, and then thirds. 

Though Scully was still eschewing red meat and only picked at the vegetables on her plate, she seemed to have had a good time. She’d spent most of the dinner deep in conversation with Libby, and his hackles raised whenever the other woman touched Scully’s arm—which happened a little too often for his liking. He couldn’t tell if Scully’s cheeks were pink from the wine or something else.

They were poised to start up the staircase when he felt a warm hand on his upper arm. He turned to find Luna shifting uncomfortably, a half-smile on her lips that didn’t meet her eyes.

“Can I speak to you?” she asked, tilting her head toward the door opposite the dining hall.

“Of course.” Mulder gestured for Scully to follow.

“Privately,” Luna clarified.

“Okay…” He mouthed _I don’t know_ over his shoulder as he left a frowning Scully at the base of the stairs.

Luna held the door open for him, and he recognized the library from photos of the Price House. Just as they were during the seances held decades ago, the walls were packed with overflowing floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. Luna gravitated toward the large circular table in the center of the room. The table where all the seances were held. She touched the wood gingerly, as though she were anticipating an electrical shock.

“How are you settling in?” Luna asked. “Is your room okay?”

“We’re quite comfortable,” he replied uneasily.

“That’s good to hear.”

Mulder didn’t feel like small talk. “Why did you want to speak to me?”

“Have you ever been to a seance?”

Mulder shook his head. “Not like this.”

“What about a house like this?” Luna circled the table, her eyes fixed on the wood grain.

“Depends on what you mean. An old Victorian? Sure.”

“You know what I mean,” she scolded.

“Yeah. I have.”

“If you’ve spent any time in a house like this…” She glided to the bookshelves, tracing titles engraved in leather. “You know they have a tendency to exploit your weaknesses.”

“That would depending on the occupants of the house, wouldn’t it?”

Luna turned to look at him, meeting his eyes for the first time. “Very true,” she agreed. “There is such a thing as benevolent spirits. They only want to be seen by the living. Sometimes they might even want to help. And then there’s the other kind.”

“And you think this house has the other kind,” he supplied.

Luna pulled a few titles from the shelves and set them on a side table. He could only catch a few words from the titles: _incantation_, _communication_, _sex magick_, _the dead_, _summoning_.

“Sage believes Nikola Price is a misunderstood feminist hero.” Luna continued to pick out books, seemingly at random. “She believes Price was maligned by history because of the stigma against spiritualism and Price’s sexually liberated attitude.”

“What do you think?” Mulder asked.

“I think it’s a comforting narrative.” She chose her words carefully. “And I think you and I both know the comforting narrative is rarely the truth.”

“Look, I didn’t come here expecting to communicate with Casper the Friendly Ghost. The things I’ve seen—”

“I’m trying to tell you that you and your partner are at risk,” Luna interrupted.

“It sounds like you’re telling me we’re all at risk.”

Luna gave an exasperated sigh. “The more baggage you bring to a house like this, the more susceptible to its darkness you become.”

Mulder’s jaw clenched. He waited for her to continue.

“I can’t presume to understand the complexities of your relationship with your partner.”

“That’s right,” he agreed.

“But whatever it is between you, it was all I could hear over dinner.” She tapped the side of her head, indicating she wasn’t hearing with her ears.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” The air in the room started to feel oppressive. His muscles tensed, poised for escape.

“You really want me to spell it out for you?”

“You’ll need to. I’m very slow.”

“It doesn’t take a psychic to figure out you two have feelings for each other you haven’t discussed,” Luna said, exasperated. “It just makes it a hell of a lot louder.”

“Why didn’t you pull both of us in here for your little intervention? Why just me?”

She cocked her head at him. “Would she have been receptive?”

“What makes you think I am?” he countered.

“Look, I would be remiss in my duties if I didn’t at least try to talk to you. Whatever is going on between you two is your business, but it makes you vulnerable. And that makes us all vulnerable.”

“You’re telling me no one else here has baggage? Craig saw four of his friends die in this house.”

“I’m telling you to be careful. And that maybe it would be prudent to have a conversation with her. A long overdue conversation, by the sounds of it.”

“Thanks for the advice,” he said. “But we’re doing just fine, thank you.”

“Are you waiting for confirmation it will be well-received?” she asked. “Because it will be.”

Mulder gaped at her, both for her gall and the meaning of her words.

“That’s all I needed to say.” Luna turned to her books, dismissing him.

“Good talk.” He couldn’t help the sarcasm.

Mulder shut the door behind him and stood there for a moment until he willed him to move his muscles to the bedroom and his partner.

For a moment, he entertained the thought of sweeping into the room and telling her right then and there. It was a nice thought, but how would that look after so long? He’d lured her out to a probably-haunted house—knowing she was more afraid of ghosts than she’d ever admit—where they were forced to share a bed. What would she think of him?

Scully deserved better.

She deserved a normal weekend away in a place that didn’t promise communication with the dead. She deserved room service and lazy afternoons and high thread counts and windows on every floor.

He would tell her.

But not here.

“What was that about?” she asked through a mouthful of toothpaste, poking her head out from the bathroom.

“Nothing.” Mulder slipped past her, assuming a place beside her in front of the bathroom mirror.

Scully narrowed her eyes at him before spitting and rinsing her brush.

“She pulled you aside to talk about nothing?” She lifted a palmful of water to her mouth.

“She wanted to discuss Craig Donnelly. If I believed his account of the events that week.”

She swished her mouth clean and ran the tap to rinse the sink. “And what does she think?”

He shrugged. “She’s not sure what to believe.”

“Uh-huh.” Her tone told him she knew he was lying.

She didn’t slam the door behind her, but the decisive click resounded in the bathroom.

* * *

Scully screwed her eyes shut as she heard Mulder finish up in the bathroom. It was too early for sleep, and she was certain he could tell the difference between her pretending to sleep and actually sleeping, but she didn’t care. She didn’t trust herself to interact with him. 

The bed shifted with his weight.

“Night, Scully,” he whispered.

It felt like he was looming over her. He didn’t move. Was he staring? Scanning her vital signs to determine if she was faking it? After a moment that felt like hours, he flopped on his back.

It was going to be a long night. She wondered if it would be a long night for Mulder, too. He’d probably be up for hours deciding which beautiful psychic he’d prefer to fuck.

Keeping her eyes closed made her feel more wired than anything. She could hear something rustling, and she was never going to be able to get sleepy without confirming that all was normal in the room, that no bedsheets were rising in the shape of a person.

Shit. She couldn’t let her mind go there.

She opened her eyes to see the lacy canopy shifting, even though it was tied to the bedposts, and there was no source of a breeze.

They fell still. Or she’d only imagined it.

_Die alone._

It was a low hiss somewhere from the corner of the room, though even her trained ear couldn’t pinpoint the location.

She must have started to drift off already, entering a hypnagogic limbo between wakefulness and sleep. With old wood and the atmosphere of the place, it would be odder if she _didn’t_ start to hear things. Right?

_Barren bitch_.

It was a carefully enunciated whisper. She couldn’t blame it on the creaking bones of the house.

“Did you hear that?” she murmured.

Mulder didn’t answer.

It didn’t sound like he was asleep. She could barely hear his breathing at all.

Scully braced herself as she turned to look at him, though she couldn’t say what she was anticipating.

Mulder was asleep, lying stiffly on his back, his arms rigidly pressed to his sides, so unlike his usual sprawl. Odd. It usually took at least an hour of bedtime entertainment for his brain to turn off.

She felt very, very alone.

She turned back away from him, pulling her knees to her chest and trying not to think about her feet being grabbed.

The voice took on a singsong quality.

_Barren bitches die alone barren bitches die alone._

It was nothing, she told herself.Irrational fears, hypnagogic state, the effects of stress, her imagination getting the best of her.

It cackled.

Scully bit her fist, the pain clarifying her mind. She knew, somehow, it was only a matter of time before the voice would come back. She felt exposed, and she couldn’t stop thinking about hands reaching between them.

She needed something to put her back against. Something—or someone—solid and preferably warm. She inched her way toward Mulder. As her shoulder brushed against his arm, she was flooded with guilt for taking advantage of him as he slept. She was violating one of their many unspoken rules; she hadn’t evaded death to earn his affection. There was no danger here. And she’d rather swallow glass than wake him and ask him to hold her.

_Barren bitches die alone barren bitches die alone._

The voice grew louder as it chanted.

She swallowed a sound between a sob and a laugh and pulled her pillow around her ears.

Stirring in response to her movement, Mulder turned on his side, facing her. One arm flopped over her waist. She pulled his hand to her chest between both of hers, holding it over her fluttering heart.

_I’m scared, Mulder_, she told him in her mind because she couldn’t say the words.

He shifted closer, forming a warm seal of safety against her back. His nose brushed against her hair, and he inhaled sharply.Scully released a sigh, her muscles uncoiling under his touch.

She wondered if, somewhere deep in his dreaming mind, he responded to the feel of her accelerated heartbeat. 


	3. Chapter 3

****Logically, Scully knew the staircase had an end. She’d seen the exterior of the Price House, and the tower didn’t disappear into the clouds. Yet they’d spent an eternity on the winding steps, flashlights dancing on the round walls. She’d been compelled to drink an extra cup of coffee that morning, and it settled in her stomach with aggressive acidity. For breakfast, she’d only been able to force down dry toast. The grease quivering on the fried eggs turned her stomach, and she’d silently deposited them on Mulder’s plate. All Scully wanted to do was crawl back under the covers, or maybe take a long soak in the enormous clawfoot tub that took the majority of the space in their retrofitted bathroom. Sleep deprivation made her feel dirty under her skin—nothing a bath could scrub away—but she was still compelled to try.

She thought of the voice—_barren bitch_—and tried to suppress the shudder, but she couldn’t help it, like the reflexive paroxysm she’d get after vomiting.

“Cold spot?” Mulder whipped around, practically panting with eagerness. “Dammit! I should’ve asked Sage to borrow her equipment.”

“On the contrary,” she replied. The higher they climbed, the hotter the air got, the denser the humidity. She felt like she couldn’t get enough oxygen.

Scully jumped at a loud thump.

“Ow,” Mulder whined, massaging the top of his head.

“Are you okay?” The impact sounded hard, but she resisted the impulse to reach out and touch him. She could feel the presence of the voice as though it were still talking to her. Not surprising, as it was a projection of her own mind.

“It’s nothing.”

He diverted his attention to the latch on the trapdoor above him.

“Are you sure?” She could—she _should_—find out for herself, but that would mean putting her fingers through his hair, getting close enough to smell his aftershave and feel the warmth radiating from his skin. No, touching him would be wrong. Pathetic. Predatory.

When he’d unconsciously tucked her into his arms last night, the voice had gotten quieter but cruder. _You think he doesn’t know how desperate you are? You think he can’t smell it on you when all you can think about is getting bent over that desk?_

“I’m okay, Doc,” he assured her.

The trapdoor creaked as he pushed it open. She heard a popping sound like threads snapping. A beam of golden light shone through the expanding opening, illuminating the dust particles in the air around them. The shifting air pressure made her woozy, and she clung to the railing.

She forced herself to climb the extra steps to match his height and poke her head through the trapdoor.

The tower attic had windows on all sides, as she’d anticipated from the exterior. On the side toward the back of the house, a jagged hole had been smashed out of the glass. Shards of glass on the floor reflected sunlight back in her eyes.

“Was that..?”

Mulder turned to her and nodded, confirming it was where Jane Creevy had plummeted to her death.

The stench of animal excrement and the musk of nests filled her nose. Wood slats with rusty nails stuck out in all directions in haphazard piles—the product of an abandoned excavation or a construction project. Shredded newspaper was stuffed into every corner. She could have sworn she saw eyes glinting at her from the shadows. Where there weren’t nests, there were puffs of white. She thought back to the noise when they opened the trapdoor and realized she recognized the sound of black widow webs being snapped.

She opened her mouth to say something, to tell him they need to get out immediately.

An eruption, gunshot loud, sent Scully careening back. She slammed her head against the side of the trapdoor frame. The stairs started to slip out from under her, her stomach lurching with vertigo. She slid back almost to the curve of the steps, feeling something invisible tugging her around the bend, like gravity itself was trying to break her neck.

Mulder grabbed her outstretched arm and sent her stumbling up toward him. He held her steady by the shoulders as she caught her breath, a difficult feat in the thick air.

“It startled me,” she said lamely.

“I noticed.” He made a poor attempt at a reassuring smile. “What was that?”

“A bird, I think. Probably a few of them. Most likely house sparrows or starlings.”

He nodded, giving her a once over before turning his attention back to the room.

“Don’t go in there,” she gasped, the words spilling out. “Black widows. Everywhere.”

He lifted his head just high enough to confirm what she said before slamming the trapdoor shut and brushing his hair for spiders.

Scully couldn’t help doing the same. Even though she hadn’t found anything, she had the same tiny prickles of sensation on her skin, like how she would feel for hours after finding a tick. She imagined black widows climbing out from their hiding places on to their pillows in the middle of the night, exploring exposed skin, crawling between parted lips.

“Fucking hate spiders,” Mulder muttered.

She followed Mulder back down the staircase, relieved he wasn’t attempting to spend more time exploring the area.

“We weren’t in any real danger. Black widows attack when threatened.”

“Maybe in normal houses,” he replied under his breath.

The third floor was anticlimactic, as Scully had anticipated. Each room, as promised, was stripped of all furniture. Even the wallpaper had been scraped off the wall, leaving bare wood and scraps of glue. She indulged Mulder in shutting one of the doors behind them, standing in complete darkness in hopes something would happen, but they’d felt nothing but the inherent oddness of sensory deprivation.

Mulder seemed deflated as they went downstairs, skipping over the second floor, though she had no idea what he was expecting to happen at high noon.

“There’s a basement, no?” Scully offered. She didn’t feel like continuing their explorations, but Mulder’s enthusiasm had an infectious quality, and she wanted it back.

“You’re right.” The sparkle returned to his eyes. “It’s where they found Michael O’Farrell.”

Scully thought back to the officer’s account of his steps that day and said, “Follow me.”

They passed through the dining hall with Sage and Luna deep in conversation, their heads bowed over a book. Libby was pretending not to eavesdrop, darting glances at them over her laptop. The door at the end of the room led to the kitchen, where Sylvia had lugged out their dinner, grumbling and refusing offers of help.

The kitchen was clearly half-remodeled. The middle of the room featured a modern, granite countertop, but the deep sinks against the wall appeared old. A magnet along the length of one wall held a variety of knives and other sharp metallic instruments. On the counter, fresh bags of produce were spread out, presumably ingredients for their forthcoming lunch. They’d need to hurry if they didn’t want to run into Sylvia.

“Ladies first?” Mulder offered, holding open a small door with stairs leading down.

She shook her head at him, giving him a “nice try” look.

Mulder flicked his flashlight back on, the beam reflecting cobwebs and dust.

“Are those…?”

“No, that's a common house spider.”

She followed him down the stairs into a dank room with walls of packed dirt. Something tickled her shoulder, and she jumped. It was only a string dangling from a bare bulb. She pulled it, releasing a stream of dust as the room filled with light.

Mulder moved to a wall of wine cubbies and extracted a bottle. He dangled it, wiggling his eyebrows suggestively. “I don’t know much about wine, Scully, but 1911?”

For a moment, she was transported back to another time: a crackling fire, Al Green on the stereo and not-Mulder leaning in close enough she could smell the red wine on his breath.

“I can think of a thousand reasons that would be a terrible idea,” she said.

His lips turned down in a pout, but he returned the bottle where he found it.

The beam of her flashlight fell over glass. Above a desk at the corner of the room, cubby-holes were carved into the dirt. Dozens of bottles and jars filled the wall, some as small as her thumbnail and others the size of her head.

“Mulder, look.” She directed her flashlight at a single jar.

He moved next to her. “What am I looking at?”

“The illustration on the front of the bottle. It’s the datura flower. Also known as jimsonweed, the devil’s trumpet, moonflower...”

“That’s what Michael O’Farrell ingested.”

“It’s highly toxic but has profound psychedelic effects. In high doses, it can cause intense hallucinations indistinguishable from reality.”

“What are you suggesting?”

“Maybe Nikola Price used this during her seances. A powerful hallucinogen combined with their suggestible states…and in smaller doses it’s been known to have an aphrodisiac effect.”

“The perfect refreshment for your average orgy-slash-seance.”

“But why wasn’t it taken in evidence after the death?”

“Strange,” he agreed.

Something rustled, and their flashlight beams danced across the room, looking for a source. Instinctively, they moved closer, Mulder’s hand resting on her side. A black snake coiled itself around the jar. It felt like it took minutes to glide across the bottle into a neighboring cubby.

As it vanished, Scully jerked away from him. With the voice still fresh in her ears, the physical contact scorched her. She caught a flash of hurt in his eyes. Maybe it would be better for both of them if he thought she was repulsed by his touch. Easier.

Out of the basement, they found a scowling Sylvia chopping onions, her wiry silver hair plastered down by a net. She turned to look at them, holding the kitchen knife out. Scully’s eyes immediately watered from the acerbic fumes, but Sylvia’s were impressively dry.

“You’re not supposed to be down there,” Sylvia scolded them, pointing the knife at each in turn.

“Sorry, Ms. Tate,” Mulder said in his most contrite voice. “It won’t happen again.”

He treated Sylvia to his most charming grin, and Scully read surprise on his face when it didn’t work. She felt like a disobedient schoolgirl as she shrugged an apology, and they scurried off.

“I guess that only leaves the great outdoors to explore,” Mulder said quietly as they moved back through the dining hall, trying not to call attention to themselves.

“No way,” she said. “It’s pouring. Can’t you hear it?”

She’d barely noticed until that moment. Sometime after they started descending the tower, torrential rain started pounding the house. Even with an umbrella, it was prohibitive.

“I can think of one other place we haven’t explored,” Scully suggested.

She led him to the foyer and nodded to the door between the staircases. It blended into the wall, leaving only the outline of the door.

“I hadn’t noticed that before.” Mulder’s brow furrowed.

_You weren’t meant to_. The thought came from nowhere, and she pushed it away.

Mulder tried the doorknob, cursing when he found it locked. She recognized the way he scanned their surroundings and took the familiar position watching his back. He extracted his lock pick from his back pocket and set to work, giving a soft whoop as a click told him he’d succeeded.

When he tried the knob, it didn’t turn.

“Son of a bitch.” He stooped back over the door, putting the pick back into place.

“Whatcha doing?”

Scully jumped, turning to find Libby leaning against the staircase.

“Trying to find out what’s behind this door,” Mulder said.

“It’s the atrium,” Libby said. “The McCoys always left it locked.”

“I noticed,” Mulder grumbled.

“You’ve done your homework,” Scully said, impressed

“That’s my job,” Libby replied brightly.

Mulder turned back to the lock, working the instruments until he heard the click again. Again, the doorknob didn’t turn.

Driven by a strange impulse, Scully reached for it. The thought _it’s meant for you_ came into her head unbidden.

The knob turned under her palm.

Mulder’s jaw dropped. Libby appraised her with curiosity.

She opened the door to be greeted by a cloud of humid air, thick with the smell of earth and plant. She could barely see above the tangle of bushes and trees to the domed glass ceiling. The rain sounded like pebbles against the skylight. There was no path, though she could see hints of polished marble under a blanket of vines and weeds.

“You need a machete to get through this,” Scully commented.

“I’m just amazed anything is still living,” Libby said.

The three of them made slow progress to the center of the atrium, judging their location only by the proximity to the center of the dome. Libby darted through grasping branches ahead of them, emerging mostly unscathed. Scully’s arms were scratched from wrestling thorny vines, and Mulder wasn’t fairing much better.

Libby gave a low whistle, and they pushed back a leaf the size of a small dog to see what she’d found.

At the center of the atrium, directly under the peak of the skylight, they saw the pond. It was amebic in shape and surrounded by a dozen marble statues. In the crime scene photos—Dale Briggs on his face in the black water—they were blurry shapes in the background.

Now, she could see they were smiling children. Cherubs. The wings on their backs were grotesquely small, incapable of bearing any weight. One leg was locked to the pedestal, and the other lifted like they skipping or attempting to run. Each carried a basket. Stone dogs slinked around their ankles, staring up at them. Though the statues had no color, the whites around the dogs’ eyes seemed to gleam. While the dogs looked worried, the children’s faces were joyful.

“Dana…”

Something about the way Libby said her name sent ice through Scully’s stomach. She forced herself to turn toward Libby’s voice.

Libby was staring at a statue of robed woman, her hands held up in prayer. Scully immediately flashed to the statue from the Our Lady of Sorrows Church she’d attended with her family when they first moved to San Diego. She’d spent hours staring at that figure during mass, the words of the priest rolling over her as she studied the pain in her eyes, the single frozen tear.

“It’s uncanny.” Libby’s voice was hushed.

It wasn’t until that moment that Scully saw it: the statue’s aquiline nose, the lift of her full upper lip, the narrow jaw. It was even Scully’s height, albeit raised on a pedestal. She reached up to touch her own cheekbone, chiseled in stone. A drop of water splashed on the statue’s open eyeball, and she recoiled.

She squinted at the skylight, wondering if the slight shadow she could make out was a hole. The raindrop slid down the statue’s cheek.

“Datura,” she murmured, noting the bush curling around the base of the statue. The flowers were tightly coiled, waiting for nightfall to open.

She turned to Mulder, finding him crouched by a statue in front of the pond. A figure of a man reaching for his own wavering reflection, evocative of Narcissus.

“It’s exquisite,” Scully murmured, running her hand down the sharply carved back muscles.

“It’s me.” His voice was low and wavering. He looked up at her with wide eyes, an expression she only saw when something truly frightened him.

She snatched her hand back, conscious of the sensual way she’d touched his likeness. And it was his likeness. The profile she knew like the back of her hand, from the prominent nose to the plump lower lip to the errant strands of hair that fell over the statue’s face, like Mulder’s had until so recently.

He reached to touch the slight swell on its marble cheek and then his own corresponding mole. He shuddered.

Scully turned around to find Libby snapping photos of the statues from all angles. She tugged at Mulder’s arm, imploring him to leave. The thought of a photo of them next to their doppelgängers made her queasy. They stumbled back through the overgrowth in the trampled path they’d formed, not caring as the thorns tore at their skin.

* * *

Sage situated the group around the circular table in the library. It was low, and Mulder was conscious of his knees pressing against the wood. He tried to shift his weight, but the table shook. 

“So it begins…” Scully intoned under her breath, and he chuckled.

Sage glared at them, tapping irritably on the table.

“Scully, you know Morse Code, right?” he whispered in her ear. “What message is she transcribing from the beyond?”

She turned to him and smiled. It was a lovely, warming sight, especially with the mood she’d been in all day. He decided he should make fun of psychics more often.

Finally, Craig wandered in, red-eyed and reeking of stale and fresh cigarette smoke.

“Thank you all for coming,” Sage said, fixing each of them with a broad smile that vanished when she turned to Craig. “As you know, tonight, at midnight, we will be conducting a seance to contact the spirit of Nikola Price, believed to still inhabit this house.” Pause for effect. “We’ve met this afternoon so you can be debriefed on the history of the house to the best of our knowledge. We will also discuss what to expect tonight.”

“You should expect nothing tonight,” Craig muttered. He clicked his Zippo open and shut, open and shut.

“Excuse me?” All the charismatic warmth leaked from Sage’s face.

“I said,” he repeated, louder. “You should expect nothing from the seance.”

“And why is that?” Her voice was sweetness and poison.

“You’re all true believers. You wouldn’t be here otherwise.” He continued to click the Zippo shut, the sound resonating in the vast room.

“Authentic belief is essential to a productive seance.”

Craig laughed, and it was an ugly sound. “Not in this godforsaken house.”

“What do you mean by that?” Mulder asked. A bad feeling started to settle in his gut.

“Nikola Price won’t deign to return from the afterlife to confirm what you already believe.” The clicking grew faster. “She’s only interested in corrupting the views of those who believe only in the material world. It’s why she targeted me before, and it’s why I’m _safe_ now.” He snarled the world ‘safe’ as though the concept were ridiculous.

“You arrived here twenty-five years ago as a skeptic,” Mulder said quietly.

Craig gave him a look that said, “no shit.”

Mulder turned to Sage. “Did you know about that? Did you know she targets skeptics?”

“I’ll tell you everything I know about Nikola Price if you let me continue.”

Mulder bit his tongue and settled back in his chair, scowling. The table rocked. Luna was watching him from across the table, anxiety carving grooves between her eyebrows.

When no one objected, Sage started at the beginning. It felt like years ago that he told Scully the same story in their office. He’d been nervous that day, unsure if convincing her to join him was the best or worst idea he’d ever had. He’d talked himself out of bringing it up several times.

As Sage explained the mysteries behind the end of Nikola Price’s life, Scully stifled a yawn.

“Am I boring you, Dana?” Sage asked, causing Scully to stiffen in her chair. Mulder imaged that was how she’d reacted any time a teacher scolded her. “Or did you not get enough sleep last night?” There was an accusation in her tone.

“Sorry,” Scully mumbled, sounding annoyed at having to apologize but wanting the interaction to be over.

“The house remained empty for a few decades,” Sage continued, “Until Simon and Natalie McCoy bought it in the late 1960s. Due to its history, they got it for a steal. They never had the opportunity to complete their renovations. Only a few months after they moved in, their decomposing bodies were found by a group of young boys from the town who rode their bikes to see the legendary haunted house. They’d been dead for over a week. The coroner determined the cause of death was cyanide poisoning.

“The McCoy family still owns the house. After the death of Simon and Natalie, they were unable to find an interested buyer. After they allowed the place to be rented by a group of investigators in the 70s, they pulled it from the market and attempted to have it demolished. Craig, perhaps you would like to illuminate us about the events that occurred that week?”

Craig gave her a disgusted look. He put a cigarette between his lips and stalked out of the room with a huff, lighting up as he opened the door. A tendril of smoke remained in his wake. Mulder wondered what Sage had offered him to lure him back into this house. He imagined it must have involved a considerable sum of money.

“As I’m sure you all know, Craig was the remaining survivor of the week-long expedition twenty-five years ago. All four of his companions died in unfortunate circumstances that were eventually ruled accidental. Jane Creevy fell from the tower window and broke her neck. Michael O’Farrell was found in the basement having ingested poison. Katy Mayer was found in the kitchen holding a butcher knife, her femoral artery severed. And finally, Dale Fletcher was found face down in the pond in the now-sealed atrium.”

Libby’s eyes flashed up to meet his.

“Sylvia found Craig Donnelly curled up in that chair.” Sage pointed to an overstuffed armchair in the corner of the library. “He was rocking back and forth with a revolver in his mouth. Before you cast any doubt on our companion, please remember, again, that he has been cleared of all wrongdoing. And even if he were somehow responsible for the events that day, he would have most certainly been under the influence of some darker force.”

Nervous looks were exchanged across the table. Even Libby seemed uneasy.

“Believing the house responsible for such destruction, the McCoys attempted to have it demolished, only to have their efforts blocked by a local historical restoration society. Refusing to sell the house to anyone as they would feel responsible for the subsequent carnage, the house remained. They allow the society to provide regular maintenance and cleaning services, though they insist that they arrive during the day and leave before nightfall.”

Mulder raised his hand as he started to speak. “Why did they agree to let us stay this time?”

“The current generation is much more amenable. It didn’t take much to persuade them to make an exception.” She gave a sly smile that told Mulder that money, blackmail or both were involved.

“We have become the first people to spend the night in this house since that fateful night twenty-five years ago.” She paused for a self-satisfied breath. “Can someone fetch Craig? He will need to be here for the next part.”

When no one moved, Luna got up with a sigh. She returned a few minutes later with a glowering Craig in tow.

“Tonight, as you all know, we will be conducting our formal seance. I will spend the rest of the afternoon and evening in deep meditation in preparation. By midnight, I will have forgone any food and drink other than water for over twenty-four hours.

“I have not asked you to do the same, though I do ask this: show up by no later than 11:30 in this very room. Bring an open mind and a willingness to listen to what the spirit or spirits inhabiting this house have to tell us. You mustn’t consume any pollutants, such as alcohol or other drugs. You must be clean of body, mind and spirit.

“For the seance itself, we will let the spirit or spirits guide us. I cannot tell you what our seance will look like as I do not yet know. However, I do ask that every one of you participate.”

Mulder looked at Scully from the corner of his eyes. She rested her cheek on her fist, looking bored.

“After, it’s recommended that you take an Epsom salt bath to cleanse yourself of any residual psychic energy you may have picked up. You’ll see I’ve provided salts in every bathroom.

“For the next several hours, please relax. Do whatever you need do to arrive tonight alert and clear-headed.”

She stood and appraised the group for a too-long moment. “’Til tonight,” she concluded, sweeping out of the room.

Scully barely suppressed a snort of laughter.


	4. Chapter 4

****Scully was curled up in an armchair, a paperback resting on her knees. Her glasses were making a slow descent down her nose, but she didn’t bother to push them up. She frowned at the page, chewing on her fingernail. For a moment, Mulder didn’t see the dark smudges under her eyes or the unhappy curve of her mouth. He saw what he wanted to come home to, and the longing filled him with a dull ache.

He cleared his throat, startling her. “I’m going to have another look around.”

“I’ll come with you.” She slid her bookmark into place and moved to get up.

“No, I promised some R&R this trip. You keep reading.”

Scully narrowed her eyes and slipped back in the chair. “Don’t go back to the tower.”

“Wasn’t planning on it.” He forced a smile and patted the doorframe. “Back soon.”

The rain from earlier had already cleared, and his gut told him to look for Luna outside. He found her on a swing, smoking a cigarette and dragging a foot.

“Tell me this isn’t _the_ tree,” Mulder said as he approached her.

“The fig tree?” She looked up and sniffed. “You must not know much about trees.”

“Can’t say I do.” He sat on the neighboring swing, feeling every each of his height.

“_The_ tree is over there.” She pointed behind the house, crooking her finger to indicate it was on the other side.

“Ah.” Mulder kicked at the grass, unsure how to broach the subject wanted to discuss with her. “I didn’t peg you for a smoker.”

“I’m not.” She looked down at the cigarette between her fingers as though just remembering it was there. “I...liberated this from Craig’s pack.”

“It won’t pollute you for the seance?”

“Maybe we should be a little polluted,” Luna mumbled, taking a ragged drag.

“You don’t want it to work?”

“Do you?”

Mulder considered. Wishing the seance wouldn’t work went against his very nature. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling something bad had already started to happen, and it was only going to get worse.

“I thought this was your job," he said.

“My job is to help people get closure with loved ones who’ve passed on. This…” She paused, staring at the ugly gap where the windows on the third floor should be. “This is dark shit we’re messing with.”

“So, why are you here?”

She fixed him with a dark look, took one last drag from her cigarette and stubbed it out on the bottom of her boots, a waterfall of sparks sizzling on the damp grass.

“You shouldn't let her participate tonight,” Luna said finally. “You know that, right?”

Mulder knew, but he had to ask. “Why?”

“You heard Craig. And she’s not exactly subtle about her skepticism.”

“Did she say something to you?”

“She didn’t need to.”

Mulder thought about Scully’s barely concealed yawns and incredulous looks throughout the meeting that afternoon, and he conceded the point.

“You’re here to ask me about her, aren’t you? If I’ve noticed anything off about her since we’ve arrived.”

“You’re good.”

Luna didn’t accept the compliment. “Jesus, you two are fucked up. Have you even tried talking to her?”

He ignored the question. “Well, have you noticed anything?”

Luna twisted the chains around her hands. When she spoke, she wouldn’t meet his eyes, staring off into the forest behind the house. “There’s a darkness surrounding her. She’s harder to read. I can’t tell if that’s because something’s blocking me or because even she is having trouble understanding her own feelings right now.”

“Can you tell what she’s feeling?”

“Anger. Confusion. Shame.”

“About what?”

“Her feelings for you, mostly.”

Mulder’s mouth went dry. “She’s ashamed to have feelings for me?”

“She’s ashamed to have feelings she doesn’t believe are reciprocated. You need to reach her. She’s starting to slip away. Can’t you feel that?”

* * *

Scully waited until the door shut before closing her book. It wasn’t like she’d been able to read, anyway. The words swam before her eyes, giving her the kind of dull, throbbing headache she used to get before she’d admitted to herself that she needed reading glasses. Anyway, her mind had no room for fiction. 

She cracked the door to see Mulder at the end of the hall, ducking back into the bedroom as he turned to the staircase. She didn’t dare to move until his footsteps faded and the front door shut.

When she couldn’t locate him through the windows in the foyer, she ventured into the library, relieved to find it empty.

Through the window, she could make out two silhouettes. Luna on a swing, her boot trailing on the ground as she moved in a languid rhythm.

The gray rainclouds hadn’t gone anywhere, but they’d stopped making good on their promises a while ago.

Luna looked up expectantly as Mulder approached. He didn’t take the empty swing next to her. He grabbed the chain on hers, bringing her to a jerking halt. He loomed over her in an unabashed display of dominance. Luna’s eyes flickered down to his crotch—so close to her face—and back up. Her lips were parted with fear or arousal or both. She licked them.

Heat rose in Scully, the kind of flush that started on her chest. Her clothes felt too tight, the waistband of her jeans digging into her roiling stomach.

The wind started to pick up outside, the tree bowing under it. Stray tendrils in Luna’s hair twisted in the wind.

Mulder said something to her, and she responded with a catlike smile.

Scully couldn’t hear anything. Not their words or the sound of wind ripping through trees. Nothing penetrated the library window, as though she were in some kind of vacuum.

Both faces turned to look toward her in perfect unison, and Scully realized she was openly gawking. She whipped around and against the wall, doubling over like she’d been gut-punched.

“Whoa, are you okay?” Libby asked as she entered the library, steaming mug of coffee in hand.

For the first time, Scully noticed the open laptop and the stack of books, heavily annotated with sticky notes.

“I’m fine,” Scully said. “I just…” She had nothing to explain her reaction.

“Your nose.” Libby was looking at her with concern and sorry. She patted her pockets. “I’m sorry I don’t have anything.”

Scully touched her face. Her finger came back with blood, taking her back to the days when her body was always cold and her mouth was always dry. And the familiar feeling of mortifying exposure as her body declared to the world with a discrete red trickle that her life was leaking away. Only now, it gushed.

“I get these all the time,” she told Libby, hoping the lie sounded convincing. “I’ll go clean up.”

She didn’t dare to look back as she fled the library. Knowing it was ill-advised, she tilted her head back as she scrambled up the stairs. She couldn’t risk leaving a trail behind her. Thick blood cascaded down her throat, making her gut lurch.

In the comfort of her bathroom, she leaned forward and pinched the bridge of her nose, watching the blood steadily spatter against the white sink. It wouldn’t stop. Hysterical laughter came out of her like the dam that burst inside her nose burst something else too.

She caught sight of herself in the mirror. It spilled over her lips, stained her teeth red. She looked like a predator enjoying her kill, but all she felt was weak. She had the distinct impression her equilibrium was gone, and she wouldn’t be able to retrieve it any time soon.

She couldn’t tell how long it took before it finally slowed.

She wiped down the sink and flushed the toilet paper, expecting Mulder to pound at the door any minute. Expecting that all-too-familiar look, her own death reflected back at her. She never wanted to see that look again.

She rinsed her mouth until the water came out clear, and then she brushed her teeth.

Mulder didn’t pound at the door. He wasn’t waiting outside for her, wondering why she’d been in the bathroom so long.

She was alone.

Somehow, she could still taste the blood.

She sat back in the recliner by the window, pulled her knees to her chest and stared at the bed that smelled like _them_.

* * *

Though the seance was the part of the weekend Scully was least looking forward to, she was relieved when 11:30 came around. Finally, they would get it over with, and Mulder would stop his relentless badgering.

They’d barely talked all afternoon and evening. Or rather, Mulder talked and Scully responded with an open hostility that made her feel childish and gratified at the same time. Whenever she started to feel guilty, she remembered the swing, the way Mulder and Luna looked at each other. Again, she was flooded with the kind of hurt that made her snarl and gnash.

No, Scully didn’t want to appease her partner or make a scene by refusing to join the seance. Sage requested everyone participate. She would participate. End of story.

They entered the library to find Libby on her knees, patting down Sage through her loose skirt. Satisfied she didn’t find anything, Libby climbed under the table with a flashlight, looking for mechanical devices.

Sage turned to them with a wolfish smile. “Fox. Dana. Don’t be shy.”

She held her arms to the side and looked up at the ceiling in the pose of a martyr.

“Go ahead,” Mulder said. “You do the honors.”

Scully gave him a look she hoped was withering.

She was a little rougher with Sage than she’d intended, finding herself going through the same motions she did with suspects. She wasn’t even sure what she was looking for, though she determined Sage wasn’t hiding any weapons under her flowing hippie skirt. It was a pointless process. If Sage truly cared about proving legitimacy, she would have asked for a full body cavity search on top of a thorough combing of the room.

“Thank you all for coming,” Sage intoned. “Please find a seat at the table.”

They selected the same chairs they’d used that afternoon. Sage lit a plethora of pillar candles and turned the lights off.

“It’s not too late to sit this one out,” Mulder whispered. “You could still watch.” His breath tickled her ear like a gnat, and she fought the urge to swat him away.

Across the table, Luna whispered to Sage, darting glances in Scully’s direction. So they were all talking about her behind her back. Great.

“Six is a perfectly acceptable number for a seance,” Sage replied to Luna at full volume. Luna sat back in her chair, glowering at Sage for her lack of discretion.

Scully crossed her arms, settling back in her chair and eyeing the others. Sage glittered with a manic energy that reminded her of Mulder when he got a lead. Luna’s lips were pressed into a thin line, her brow furrowed. Craig stared at the center of the table. He looked like he was pretending he was somewhere else. Libby took surreptitious snapshots of the scene. Scully discretely put her hand in front of her face and averted her eyes.

“Salt,” Sage commanded.

Luna stood, and Scully could tell she was none too pleased with being ordered around. She poured a thick circle several feet outside the table, stepping neatly over the line to return to her seat.

Sage instructed that everyone hold hands. Mulder’s enveloped her own. In spite of her irritation with him, she found comfort in the familiarity. Libby’s hand was cold, her fingers doll-like. She squeezed Scully’s palm, and something about the gesture felt too intimate. The wrong hand, she thought before chastising herself.

Sage instructed them to close their eyes and began with an opening prayer, some nonsense about inviting the spirit of Nikola Price to join us, invoking the walls between the spirit realm and the physical plane to thin. Scully tuned her out, until the table rocked and she tensed. 

“Was that the spirit of Nikola Price?” Sage asked eagerly.

“Um, that was me,” Mulder admitted.

Scully stifled a laugh, despite herself.

“If you are here with us, give us a sign,” Sage demanded. “We invite you to communicate with us. If you can hear us, give us a sign.”

They waited for a long moment of complete silence before Sage repeated, “If you are here with us, give us a sign.”

No knocking, no apparitions. Scully looked out of the corner of her eye to confirm that even the candle flames were barely moving.

“If you are here with us, give us a sign.”

After trying once more to no avail, she instructed, “Everyone together.”

“If you are here with us, give us a sign,” they chanted obediently. The incredulity in Scully’s voice stood out like a choir with one member out of key.

Scully opened her eyes at the loud thump. All the windows in the library had swung open. The candles blew out in a soft whoosh, leave too-large plums of curling smoke in their wake. The smoke twisted together into a swirling column that rose to the ceiling.

“Are we communicating with the spirit of Nikola Price?” Sage asked the air.

All seven chairs were forced back. For a brief moment, they were able to hold each other in place, hands grasping painfully. The force was too strong, and they were thrown back, crunching through the salt circle. Scully was knocked against the bookshelf several feet behind her. She barely had time to look at Mulder and before their chairs lurched forward. The table hit her hard in the solar plexus, knocking the wind out of her.

Mulder’s voice came from far away, asking if she was okay. She heard herself reassure him.

“If we are communicating with the spirit of Nikola Price, please give us a sign,” Sage demanded. As if that weren’t enough of a sign.

A thump came from somewhere in the ceiling.

“Nikola Price, show yourself to us.”

The table rippled, the wood bending unnaturally with a creaking noise like it was being rent apart and crushed back together at the same time. The candles tilted and righted themselves as the surface flattened.

“Would you speak to me through the pen?”

Luna wordlessly handed Luna a stack of blank printer paper and gold ballpoint pen.

“Spirit of Nikola Price, we want to hear what you have to say.”

Sage held the tip of the pen to the first page. She let out a breath and started to move in slow circles. Her eyes were blank, wide open and staring at nothing. The loops started too narrow.

They all leaned toward her as letters formed, squinting in the near-black light. Without the candles, only the beams of moonlight through the open windows illuminated the room.

“‘Do you believe,’” Luna read. “‘Do you believe now.’”

They watched as Sage shoved aside the first page and repeated the same words on the next one. Luna silently grabbed the page as it fluttered to the ground and passed it around the room. Craig barely glanced at it. Mulder’s eyebrows raised as he handed it to Scully.

An involuntary shudder came over her as she touched the page. And then a flash of blinding light as the page ignited. She dropped it to the table with a yelp. The paper curled in itself as a single flame overtook it, leaving a pile of ash and the smell of smoke.

Sage’s writing grew faster and faster.

Luna read, “‘Do you believe now DR.’ Doctor? Is anyone here a doctor?”

“I’m a medical doctor,” Scully said through a dry throat.

Sage wasn’t blinking, and Scully realized she probably hadn’t for several minutes. She filled in page after page, Luna keeping the discarded papers stacked neatly in front of her.

Sage’s eyes rolled back in her head, only the whites showing. The letters grew larger, visible even in the dim, slippery light. “WE HAVE PLANS.” With one final “DR” scrawled at the bottom, Sage slumped.

Scully pushed her chair back, rushing to Sage’s side. She squinted at her watch before pressing her fingers against the pulse point in Sage’s throat. Satisfied her heart rate was normal, albeit fast, Scully pushed up her eyelids.

“Flashlight, now,” she snapped at Mulder, who deposited his penlight into her outstretched hand. She shone the beam directly into Sage’s pupils.

“I’m okay,” Sage murmured, pushing Scully’s hand away. “Get that thing out of my eyes.”

“You need medical attention.”

“I’m fine.” She waved a hand over her face. 

Scully retreated, but Sage's gaze followed her. “She’s taken a keen interested in you.”

“Who has?” Scully asked.

Sage merely gave her an enigmatic smile.

Out of view, Mulder snapped, “No shit.”

Sage didn't stop staring when she said, “How lucky.”


	5. Chapter 5

It was a perfect day. She was bathed in golden light, the white lace of the canopy fluttering in a light breeze. The silk sheets were slippery against her naked body. Everything soft and smooth except her husband’s scratchy legs rubbing against her. He pressed her arousal against her hips, activating her own primal need. She wanted—she _needed_—to be taken by him, to be filled. 

He planted kisses on her shoulder, moving his way up her neck, finding her erogenous zones with practiced ease.

_Drip, drip._ She couldn’t identify the location of the sound, but she couldn’t bring herself to care.

She turned to him, offering only a closed-mouth kiss until she had a chance to brush her teeth. He took the hint, turning his attention back to her throat and down, down, his tongue wrapping around her nipples in turn.

Her body was so grateful for the touch she wanted to scream. It felt like it had been an eternity since she’d been touched like that. How was that possible?

“We can’t,” she said, knowing it was true as the words came out of her mouth. “The children are waiting.”

Her husband looked up, his face poised between her thighs.

“To hell with the children.”He dipped his head down, his tongue curling.

She pulled him up by his hair.Her center was molten with desire, but she had to stop him. The children were waiting. The window was open, and she couldn’t trust herself to control her vocalizations. Not with the pulse of raw need threatening to consume her. Whose name would she be yelling? She couldn’t remember. All she remembered was he belonged to her.

“It’s time for breakfast,” she told him.

“I was just getting to that,” he protested, looking down at her body with longing. She knew he could see how wet she was, and that made her cunt throb.

She squirmed out from under him, sitting up.

She blinked.

She was at the end of the dining table. She adjusted the bodice of her dress, willing her body to stop pulsating.

Her husband sat at the opposite end, six children between them. He winked at her. She flooded with guilty arousal; her body wouldn’t stop betraying her, even while surrounded by her family.

“You okay, mom?” asked a red-haired girl sitting to her right. Her voice sounded modern, incongruous with her 19th-century dress.

“Scully!”

The call came from a distance. Where did she know that name?

“Scully!”

That was her name, she remembered. Her name from before.

Her body started to shake, her muscles spasming without her control. She was most likely having a seizure, but it felt like some invisible force was jostling her. Not to hurt her. To get her attention? There was a new smell over the porridge and coffee, something masculine and familiar.

Her husband and their children stared at her, mouths wide with horror.

_Drip, drip_. Still, that damned noise.

She was hot under her dress and no wonder. It had so many layers.

“Oh my god, Scully.”

She could feel them, the invisible hands moving her body. She tried to claw at them, shove them away, but they kept returning.

“Scully, you need to wake up. _Fuck_. Scully, please…”

The girl tilted her head. “Mommy, what’s happening to you?”

Hands on her face, pulling at her. The family dissolved. She caught flashes of green and white and a familiar face.

She was being held.

She was in the Price House.

“Mulder?” She adjusted her eyes to see the moonlit atrium behind her partner’s face. “What happened?”

“I woke up, and you weren’t in bed.”

“What am I doing here?”

“I’d like to ask you that,” he said. “I checked here first because…I guess I had a hunch you would be here. Do you remember how you got here?”

She remembered convincing Mulder to go to bed after the seance. She remembered waiting for him in bed with heavy eyelids. And she remembered in too-vivid detail the dream and the face of her husband. As she extracted herself from Mulder’s arms, she became acutely aware of how her body had reacted. The humidity of the atrium left the rest of her body damp, too.

Scully shook her head.

He did nothing to hide the worry on his face. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” She brushed herself off. “I must have sleep-walked.”

“Have you done that before?”

She couldn’t bring herself to look directly at him. “Not in years. But instances of somnambulism can be triggered later in life by stress or sleep deprivation.” She was relieved by how smoothly her words were coming out, how clean her justifications, until she realized what she’d admitted.

He gave her a long look. “Can you stand?”

She nodded, gratefully accepting his outstretched hand and stumbling to her feet. 

Her muscles threatened to give out as she looked up at the statue she'd been sleeping beneath. 

“Do you see it?” she whispered. 

Our Lady of Sorrows, eyes heavenward, and a trickle of blood down one nostril. It tracked over the lips, a droplet hovering on her chin.

Mulder swept his finger over the drip. He rubbed the blood on his pajama bottoms, leaving a smear on fabric and his skin. Scully’s stomach rolled.

“It’s just the rain, like before,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

Two tiny trickles of blood bloomed on the statue’s lower torso. Where her ovaries would be.

“Of course.” She tried to laugh, but it came out ragged, jarring. “Just the rain.”

A golf-ball-sized burst of blood appeared on her stomach. Instinctually, Scully felt the pucker of her corresponding scar through the fabric.

There was one more place she needed to check.

“What are you doing?”

She ignored him, crushing datura leaves under her foot as she peered around the other side of the statue. She had to bite her lip to stop herself from crying out as she saw it.

Just above the statue’s shoulders, between folds of stone fabric, there was a tiny red dot. 

“What do you see?” She could hear excitement under his concern.

She shook her head. “Nothing.”

Out of the corner of her eye, more red contrasting against white marble caught her eye. The statue that looked like Mulder. Red lines crisscrossed his back like he had been recently whipped.

_Drip, drip._

Tentatively, she stepped closer, crouching to see his face.

His neck was torn open, the edges of the marble skin curling back. Blood steadily trickled into the pond from the gaping wound.

She bit back a gasp.

“What do you see?” he repeated.

Scully shook her head, not trusting herself to respond.

She didn’t want to look back at her own marbled visage, but she knew she must.

The statue’s wrists were split. Blood poured out of the wound, splashing on the marble.

“What was it?” he pressed.

“Must have been a shadow,” she said, willing herself to believe her own words. “Trick of the light.”

He made an affirmative noise, but she could tell he didn’t believe her.

She felt like they were all watching her: Mulder and the statues and something else. Something omnipresent but too malevolent to feel like God. She turned her back on all of them as she made her escape. 

* * *

The shower was baptismal. The warmth kept making her mind drift back to her dream—the golden bed with her golden husband and an eternity wrapped up together. She drank from the steaming water, knowing she shouldn’t but needing to sate her thirst. The humidity of the atrium left her parched.She scrubbed at herself with a soapy loofah until her skin was red. She’d been laying on the datura, and if she had to scour off a couple layers of skin, so be it. Every part of the plant was toxic. 

When she was satisfied she was as clean as she'd get without a decontamination shower, she set down the loofah in surrender and rinsed the conditioner from her hair.

A flash of color. She couldn’t make sense of it. Smears of pink, no, red on her fingertips. She touched her face, expecting another nosebleed, but the water itself turned crimson.

Blood.

Blood pounding on her head, streaming down her body in rivulets of gore. Blood on her face, in her eyelashes, on her lips.

Her brain flashed blank, unable to adjust to what was happening. She regained her senses enough to scramble to turn the shower off. The room was thick with the smell of iron, like a crime scene without the stench of decay.

She was screaming. She hadn’t realized that until she heard Mulder calling her name. She opened the shower door to see the doorknob shaking, not turning. The door had been unlocked. He’d practically begged her not to lock it when she insisted on taking a shower after he found her…there.

“Scully, get back!” he called before the first kick to the door resounded.

The second kick sent the door crashing against the sink, the wood splintering.

Was she still screaming? No, all she could hear was Mulder. “Are you hurt?” he kept asking, and she kept shaking her head. His hands were all over her, smearing the blood from her throat, her face, her wrists, over her heart, all the vital areas.

“You see it,” she whispered, knowing he must.

“Uh, yeah.” He gave her an incredulous look. “Are you sure you’re not hurt?”

“I’m…” She stopped herself from saying she was fine. She was tired of lying about that. “I’m not wounded,” she said.

“What the hell happened?”

“The shower,” she managed. “The water. It turned to blood.”

“Where did you get this?”

He peeled her fingers from a metallic object. A straight razor. How long had she been holding it?

“I…I don’t know.” She relinquished it to him, noticing the odd loss of the weight of it in her hand.

He folded it and dropped it in the pocket of his pajama bottoms.

She looked down at herself, letting out a helpless laugh. “You think this time it will go away if we walk out the front door?” she asked, relieved she was still capable of making an attempt at a joke.

“Did you want to try?” he replied half-serious.

“I want it off me.” She looked balefully back at the shower.

“Bath,” Mulder said decisively.

“Bath,” she agreed. In her blind terror, she’d forgotten about the existence of baths. Mulder’s voice soothed her, reminded her that it was only a problem that needed to be solved. But she looked down at her body, the substance starting to dry on her skin and knew a bath wouldn’t be enough. The water would turn red again, and there would be no cleaning her.

Her stomach muscles rippled with nausea as she unconsciously licked her lips, tasting iron, feeling the way the blood had started to cake on her chapped lips.

She couldn’t even bring herself to cover her breasts with her arms; she couldn’t stand to touch her own body, filthy with blood that didn’t belong to her.

“Get it off me.” She hadn’t meant the words to come out in a sob, but she was past caring. She couldn’t even bring herself to care that she was stark naked in front of her partner.

“We will.” He smoothed his hands over her shoulders, and she was struck by another thought.

“Gloves. You need gloves,” she instructed. “Wash your hands.” Using her doctor voice made her feel a bit more like herself.

Mulder chuckled.

“What?”

“I’m not getting gloves,” he said. “Come on, let's get to work on that bath.”

He handed her a pristine white towel, and she wrapped it around her, not caring that she was defiling it. Somewhere in the back of her mind, it occurred to her that it was odd either one of them had taken so long to think of the towel. Like chatting while she was stark naked and covered with blood was a regular occurrence.

There was a rush in her ears; it took her a moment to recognize the sound of running water and focus her eyes on it.

She yelped. The water was running red.

“It’s only rust,” Mulder assured her. “Old pipes.”

He waited until it cleared before sealing the tub and holding a washcloth under the stream. When he squeezed out the excess, his hand mirrored his statue perfectly.

He moved toward her, and she wasn’t sure what he was doing until the wet cloth brushed her forehead, a balm to her skin. There was such tenderness in his eyes, such calm attentiveness as he cleaned her. When he passed the washcloth over her mouth, she gasped. It felt like the first breath she’d taken in hours.

He rinsed the cloth in the sink and returned to wipe down her arms. Occasionally, the smell in the room would make him gag, but he did his best to conceal it.

“Maybe you should, uh…” He held out a freshly rinsed washcloth, now stained pink.

She shook her head. “Get it off me.” As she dropped the towel to the tiles, she kept her gaze fixed on the steam rising from the clawfoot.

“Get it off me,” she repeated, quieter. “Please.”

She knew she should take the washcloth and do it herself. She should tell him to turn around. But somewhere inside, she howled at him to make it right. Begged him not to make her beg, not to be repulsed by her, even in this primal state, looking like she’d just stepped out of an adult-sized womb. She couldn’t tell if her need was born out of some touch-starved psychosis, the manipulations of the house, or merely a desire to relinquish the problem to the one she trusted.

“We should get your hair first,” he said. “It’s dripping.”

He wasn't stalling, she realized as she registered the fresh drops on her shoulders. 

She tipped her head into the sink, painting another surface in gore. She relaxed into his touch as he massaged her shampoo into her scalp. It took three rinses before the water came away clear.

He handed her a fresh towel for her hair and the washcloth, waiting for her to change her mind. 

When she didn’t move, he nodded almost to himself and ran the cloth across her sternum and down her front. The sign of the cross, though she was certain that was unintentional. He was coming to terms with the fact that he’d been given permission to touch her breasts.

She inhaled sharply as the cloth grazed her erect nipple. Mulder’s head jerked up, an apology poised on his tongue. She nodded for him to continue.

It was too much, the look of discovery in his eyes, like he was polishing a precious object and revealing its true value. She could practically hear his eidetic memory click as he took mental snapshots of her exposed skin. She swallowed.

His touch was delicate as he lifted her breasts, one after the other, to clean the blood trapped beneath. Her skin was so sensitive, she had to bite her lip to keep herself from moaning. She knew he noticed. He always noticed.

When he dropped to his knees, her body betrayed her, her arousal acute despite the sting of iron in her nose and the streaks of blood she knew still painted the shower behind her. Too many fantasies had started like that, Mulder in supplication before her naked body.

He looked up at her, fear and desire and something softer in his eyes. He held her gaze for a long moment before turning his attention to her thighs.

The voice remained mercifully at bay, but she could still hear the laughter and mocking words echoing in her mind. _The only way you can get him to touch you._

When he finished her legs and feet, she was grateful to be turned around, to let him continue out of sight. She could hear his ragged inhale as the cloth passed over her ass cheek.

He finished her backside quickly; her front had gotten the worst of it.

Mulder straightened, turned the bath off, indicating she was as clean as she was going to get.

Water and steam caressed her skin as she sank into the tub, watching a ribbon of blood swirl up from the one place he wouldn’t touch her.

* * *

Scully curled her knees to her chest and bit her tongue to stop her teeth from chattering. 

Mulder found an extra blanket and threw it over her before rummaging through his suitcase to find a wool sweater. She pulled it on gratefully, but it didn’t help. Nothing would. It was the bone-cold that came from sickness and dying and the ends of the earth. She knew it well.

The bath had warmed her, body and soul, but it was temporary. The moment she stepped out of the water, the chill set in. 

Mulder slid into bed next to her. He put a hand between her shoulder blades, pulling her closer. His skin was scorching. She clung to him, desperate and beyond caring about how it looked. He didn’t make any jokes about sleeping bags, but they were long past that.

“The razor is gone,” he said to the top of her head. “It’s not in my pocket.”

“When was the last time you saw it?”

“Couldn’t say.” He circled her back with his palms, the friction heating her skin. “I was a little distracted.”

She huffed, not knowing how to interpret the comment.

They were quiet for a moment, but for the sound of their breathing.

“Is this helping at all?” he asked in a low voice.

“A little.” Nothing would help her, she knew, but it wasn’t hurting either. Her teeth hurt from the cold. She curled her nails in his back like she was digging for stores of warmth.

_Got him where you want him?_

She shook her head against his chest, willing the voice to go away, to let her sleep. 

“What’s going on with you?” he murmured.

“I’m cold.”

“Yeah, I got that much.”

_He doesn’t want a desperate cunt._

Mulder pulled back to look at her. She couldn’t stand his expression, all twisted with a fear she was attempting to allay.

She shook her head again and put her forehead against his chest. He sighed and pressed his lips to her hair, not quite a kiss.

She could handle the voice. She could listen to it with all its cruelties and even spend another night listening to it if she must. And the first thing she would do when she got home would be to call her therapist and up her sessions to thrice-weekly. She was clearly having some kind of mental breakdown, but she knew just leaving that goddamn house would help.

Her rationalizations soothed her, but she had trouble holding on to her thoughts. Her inner voice got quieter and quieter until she could barely hear it.

There was a moment of blinding fear, a lurch of vertigo, her mind screaming in warning.

The moment passed.

Intellectually, Scully knew that something bad had happened, that there were more reasons than ever to be frightened, but she didn’t care. It felt wonderful not to care. She wished she’d thought of it sooner.

When the voice returned, it wrapped around her like a blanket. It stopped her trembling.

It told her that if she listened, she would be okay.

It told her to hold her partner closer, and she did.

It told her that if she listened carefully and followed instruction, she could hold him like that forever.


	6. Chapter 6

****“Wake up, baby,” purred a soothing voice. “Wake up. Baby, wake up.” The voice rose in a shriek until it split Mulder's ears. “_Wake up wake up wake up_.”

A cold hand smoothed back his hair.

He resented being wrenched away from his strange, lovely dream. Silky sheets and a beautiful wife and a menagerie of children waiting for them. He’d felt needed and loved, his wife’s desire for him was palpable. He was achingly hard.

He opened his eyes to see Scully looking down at him and smiling. The face of his dream-wife. In sleep, he had forgotten her name, as though they’d become something eternal, their mortal names having lost their meaning.

Shit. He’d never intended to fall sleep. Same as last night, he’d fallen into unconsciousness like a switch was flicked off. The house cured his insomnia when he most needed it. Last he remembered, Scully’s nails were digging into his back as she clung to him. He wondered if she left marks, and the thought sent a guilty thrill through him.

Scully appraised him like he was a prize and she was coming to collect. Her hair framed her face in loose waves, and her makeup—scrubbed away in the bathroom earlier that night—had been reapplied. It was darker than usual, her eyes smudged with black liner, her lashes fuzzy with mascara. Her lips were painted the color of fresh blood.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

“What time is it?” he asked.

Scully sat back on her haunches. Fully dressed in all black, she looked a bit like a cat burglar. An extremely sexy cat burglar, he couldn't help thinking.

“It’s late,” she replied. “Or earlier, depending on how you look at it.”

He cast a glance at his watch. They’d only been asleep for an hour or two. Or at least, he had.

“Why’d you wake me?” Mulder affected a stretch, reaching under his pillow for the handcuffs he’d slipped there last night. Covering them with his palm, he slid them under the blankets and tucked them into his pocket.

“I have something I want to show you.”

“Can’t it wait until the morning?”

She didn’t reply, she just shook her head slowly.

Fuck.

“Let me get dressed, then.”

“Be quick about it.”

She didn’t take her eyes off him as he peeled off his white t-shirt and replaced it with a grey one. She continued to stare as he slipped off his pajama bottoms, pulled up his jeans and stooped to lace his boots. He considered tucking the cuffs in his sock, but that would make them harder to access quickly. She might see the outline from his back pocket, but he’d have to take the risk. He angled his body in such a way that she wouldn’t see him drop the cuffs into his jeans.

“Where are you taking me?” he asked.

She was silent for a moment. Her gaze dropped to his lips when she said, “A place you haven’t explored yet.” Her voice was low, leaving no question about the double entendre.

She took his hand in hers and led him downstairs and toward the front door. He looked for lumps in her tight jeans where she might be keeping the missing straight razor. She raised an eyebrow, and he couldn’t tell if she’d caught him or if she thought he was checking her out.

“It’s cold outside,” he told her. “I don’t have a jacket.”

“You won’t need one.”

She touched his arm, and a prickling heat spread through his limbs. He felt he’d been under the sun for an hour.

“I don’t wanna go outside,” he tried again as she pushed open the front doors with no effort.

“Suit yourself.”

She was already gliding down the steps when the doors slammed shut behind her.

He swore. The doorknob turned for him, the house reluctantly releasing him to the wilderness.

Outside, he caught a flash of red and black disappearing around the corner. He jogged after her, past the swings and the atrium’s exterior, cursing as she slipped into the darkness of the forest.

He was prepared to chase her, his flashlight poised, but she was waiting for him just past the point where the light touched the forest. Her skin seemed to reflect moonlight even though the moon was no longer visible.

She took the flashlight from his hand before he had time to react. “You won’t be needing this,” she said. He almost lunged for her, but she switched it off and put it in her back pocket, giving him a “come and get it” look.

“Follow me,” she told him. “It’s time.” Her words took on an eery blankness like she was reading from a script.

She threaded her fingers through his, gripping him firmly.

“Time for what?” he asked, dreading the answer.

Scully didn’t respond. She led him through the woods like she knew the path as intimately as she knew her own apartment. Dead leaves and twigs cracked under his feet. Scully made almost no noise; gravity didn’t seem to apply to her.

Mulder should have forced her to leave that night. He should have driven her all the way back to Georgetown while she still looked like the final girl in a slasher. Whatever was about to happen, it was all his fault. 

The forest opened up to a pristinely circular clearing. Surrounded by dirty marble tiles, a fountain stood in the center, featuring a woman in a torn dress looking up at the sky. She held a basket filled with trumpet-shaped flowers, and a trickle of water flowed over it, emptying into a seashell basin.

Scully glowed. She looked beautiful and deadly like she was designed by nature to warn the world of her danger. She reached for his face, grazing his cheek with her fingertips. Her nails felt like the edges of blades.

“I know you don’t want me,” she said when she finally spoke. There was a resigned sadness in her voice.

He almost wanted to laugh. “What are you talking about?”

“It’s okay.” She sounded sincere. “It’s okay that you don’t want me. I know what you want.” She trailed her fingers down his chest. “And it’s not me.”

“Where’d you get that idea?” He tried to keep his tone light.

“I’ll never agree with you, and I’ll never control you. What good am I to you?”

He opened his mouth to respond, but she continued. “I’m seeing things clearly for the first time in six years.” She moved her fingers back up his chest, stopping at his collarbone and pressing in painfully. “I know you don’t want me. But you need me. And that could be enough.”

“Enough for what?” His own voice sounded distant beneath the pounding blood in his head.

“Enough for forever.”

Her smile grew teeth.

Mulder inched his hand toward his back pocket.

“Aren’t you tired, Mulder?”

He’d never felt more wired in his life. “Course I am. You woke me up.”

Her hand rested on his left shoulder. She knew. She had to know. He kept his arm crooked at an awkward angle, inches away from the cuffs.

“I’m so tired of fighting all the time. I’m so tired of the darkness. Aren’t you? I’m so...so…tired.”

“Let’s go home,” he reasoned. “Take that long vacation the boss owes you. I should have never brought you here.” His voice twisted with real regret when he said the last part.

“Don’t you get it?”

She stood on her tip-toes, her skin glowing like bone. Her lips were cold when she pressed them against his. But they were soft, and they belonged to Scully, and if they weren’t both about to die, he would appreciate how perfectly their faces fit together.He tried to open his mouth—in his mind, some nonsense about true love’s first kiss breaking the spell—but she pulled back.

Melancholy pulled at every line of her face. She didn’t look like Scully anymore.

She said, “We are home.”

She lunged for the handcuffs at the same time Mulder did, her nails tearing the back of his hand. He jerked away. In the second he was off-balance, she clicked the bracelet shut around a wrist.

He held his arm upright, reaching for the swinging cuff to push it out of her reach, but she jumped and grabbed it, yanking it down in a hard tug. He tried to resist, but she brought one swift, sharp knee between his legs.

Pain clouded his vision, sent him reeling back until he hit the sharp edge of the seashell basin of the fountain behind his knees. He ricocheted toward her, and she smoothly clicked the other cuff shut.

“Fuck!” He stomped on the marble, sending new pain from the bones of his foot up through his leg. For a second, it distracted him from the excruciating throb between his legs.

He looked into Scully’s lost eyes and said, “Nikola Price.”

Scully—or rather, the spirit inhabiting Scully’s body—held her hand in front of her face, twisting to observe her bloody fingertips. She put her index and middle fingers in her mouth, pursing her lips and hollowing her cheeks as she sucked. Her thumb stuck out like the handle of a simulated gun. She released them with a pop, dipping her red tongue out to flick against the back of a nail. She rooted out a chunk of Mulder’s skin, displaying it to him on the tip of her tongue.

She laughed at him when he gagged.

“What do you want, Price?”

He struggled pointlessly against the metal, but it only chafed harder.

“Your partner has thought a lot about you and those cuffs,” she said. “Most of the time, it’s the other way around. But she goes both ways.” She regarded him. “Or did you not know that?”

Mulder kept his face impassive. Out of the corners of his eyes, he searched the edges of the clearing for the best escape route, but he could see only darkness. He figured they still had a few hours before dawn. Whatever the spirit had planned for him, he doubted it would take that long.

“There was another way, you know,” she mused. “The moment you two walked through the door, I thought to harvest the power of your coupling. So much energy there, and in such beautiful vessels.” She held his chin between her damp fingers, turning him from one side to another to study his face. “But sex has no magic unless it’s freely given. Imagine my disappointment to learn you would do anything for _your Scully_ except fuck her.”

“Scully, I know you’re in there,” he said, trying to ignore the spirit. “You need to fight her. You need to fight this.”

“I can’t make sense of it,” she said mockingly. “What is she to you? Your sidekick? Your mommy? Your replacement little sis?”

The cuffs tightened as Mulder clenched his fists. “Price, I’m not talking to you. I don’t want to hear it.”

“Yes, you do.” Her voice was lower than Scully’s, smokier. “I know you don’t want me to tear this face to shreds.”

Mulder shook his head, making himself dizzy.

She touched Scully’s manicured fingernails to her forehead, pressing into the skin, leaving eight half-moon impressions. She lowered her fingers to above Scully’s eyes and said, “I don’t need my vessels to have sight, either.”

Mulder felt himself blanch. “No! Stop! I’ll do what you want. Don’t hurt her.”

“That’s right.” She bared her red-smeared teeth. “You be a good boy.”

“What do you want?” he repeated.

“Your partner knows,” she told him. “I showed her. But she wouldn’t have told you, would she?”

Mulder kept his mouth shut.

“_Would she_?” Price barked.

“I don’t know.”

“She sees more than she tells you. I wonder why that is. An issue with trust, perhaps?”

Mulder shook his head again.

“She could have been great like me if only she didn’t shut herself off. But that was a beacon to me. She summoned me so easily. Just by walking through the front doors. I’ve never met one so closed off and so consumed by darkness.”

“Scully was fine before you got to her,” he countered.

Price let out another ugly laugh. “You can’t believe that. Even the so-called psychic and her sycophants could see it.”

She closed some of the distance between them. Her breath was cold on his face.

“She has lost so much,” she went on. “For what? A small, _celibate_ life.” She spat the last word, as though the muscles in her mouth recoiled instinctively around the word. “Lord, that woman has a filthy mind. To think she calls herself a Catholic.” She leaned in confidentially, her nail tracing his jaw. “She thinks about your cock when she touches yourself. Every way a man can take a woman.”

Mulder twisted away from her touch.

She eyed him from head to toe before stating, “Not that I can blame her.”

He could kick her, fling his bodyweight at her, attempt to restrain her until she found a way to Luna or just past the iron gate, but he kept seeing Scully's head shattering on the marble. He couldn’t move.

There was a metallic click as the straight razor materialized in her hand.

Her eyes were bright, glittering from an unknown source of light.

“Scully, I know you can fight her,” he tried.

“Did you not hear her?” Price asked, her voice all fake-innocence. “Scully is tired. She is ready for it to be over.” She held the razor up. “And you are too.”

Again, he tried to address Scully, pleading with her to fight it. “I know you wouldn’t let her…” he started to say, but he couldn’t finish the sentence.

The blade was at the base of his throat. It scratched at his stubble as it traveled up, tipping his chin. Before he knew it, it was pressed to his jugular.

Beads of sweat appeared on Scully’s forehead.

“That’s good,” he told her. “That’s good, Scully. You fight her.”

She sounded like Scully again when she said, “It has to be this way.”

Price added, “Or else the bitch dies alone.”

Scully’s head snapped from side to side.

Mulder tried not to breathe, afraid the slightest movement would push the blade into his flesh, easy as butter.

He struggled to keep his voice level. “That’s good, Scully,” he repeated. “You fight her.”

Mascara tracks mingled with the sweat on her wet face. Her mouth started to silently work, forming shapes but no words like she was trying to chew the air.

“Scully, you fight her, and we’ll go home. I know you want to sleep in your own bed. I know you want to see your family. They love you so much. We all love you so much.”

Her face contorted, her throat working like she was coughing up a hairball. She finally formed the words: “We’ll have all the time in the world.”

“We will,” he agreed. “But not like this. You fight her, and we’ll talk, okay? I know she lied to you about me. About us. You fight her, and I’ll tell you how I feel. I’ll show you. But not while _that_ is listening.”

His own face was wet with tears, but he didn’t care. Maybe it could help reach her.

Her arm trembled. He could feel a drop of blood sliding down his neck. All it would take was the flick of a wrist to end his life.

“Please, Scully. Please fight her. For me. For us.”

Sweat and tears glimmered on her face. Her whole body shook from the effort.

He said anything that came to his mind to encourage her, knowing just the sound of his voice might help. He could barely register the words coming from his mouth.

Her arm spasmed away from his neck. Her muscles jerked, her arm swinging the razor out to the side, then up, then with one final wrenching movement, she released it. It spun across the marble.

Mulder lunged for it and kicked it into the blackness of the forest.

Scully crumpled to the stone floor.


	7. Chapter 7

The world was upside down. 

Scully was on her back, looking up at the dim outline of trees. She held her hands out, flexing her fingers, remembering how it felt when her muscles responded to her commands. She was alive, and her body belonged to her again.

There was something soft yet firm beneath her. Someone. Someone twisting and groaning. She turned to look.

“Mulder? Oh my god. What happened?”

His face was contorted with pain. Blood leaked from a small cut on his neck. Scully shuddered with the recollection of how it felt like to press a razor to his throat. How it felt to slam her knee between his legs.

Scully knew what happened. _She_ happened.

“Don’t worry about me,” he told her.

“We need to get this cleaned and dressed,” she said, inspecting the wound on his neck. “Where else are you hurt?”

He nodded over his shoulder.

She scrambled behind him to see his scratched hand and the blood oozing from around his handcuffs. It looks like his full body weight—and possibly hers, too—landed on the cuffs, crushing the metal into his wrists.

“What’s the prognosis, Doc? Am I gonna live?”

“Let me help you up.”

“That bad, huh?”

She shook her head. “I’m concerned about infection with your wrists, but I don’t think you’ll need stitches. Can you move them?”

He twisted his wrists in a circle, wincing as the metal pushed into his cuts.

“Nothing’s broken, at least,” she said.

Mulder leaned on her shoulder, and she took his weight as he stumbled to his feet. She braced her hand against his back, and he hissed in pain.

“I fell pretty hard on my back,” he explained.

“Where else?”

“Well, my balls have seen better days.”

She bit her lip, grateful they weren’t facing each other.

Scully held his arm, keeping him steady as they navigated the obstacles at their feet. They managed to stumble out of the forest and back in the house.

In the bedroom, Scully found her own handcuff key from her bag. Mulder let out a grateful sigh as the bloody restraints hit the floor. She directed him into the bathroom and rinsed his hands and wrists under the tap, gently cleaning the skin around the area with soap. Mulder seemed to try his best to contain his pained reactions. When she considered the wounds clean, she sat him down on the toilet.

She opened her medical bag on the sink and closed her eyes, taking a deep breath and willing her hand to steady. She wouldn’t do him any good with a full tremor; she needed to not hurt him any more than she already did. That thought sent a splinter of guilt through her.

His eyes followed her every movement. While she was grateful for his silence, she was afraid the moment he broke it, she would lose what little composure she had. When she knelt before him, he held out his wrists as if waiting for her to cuff him again.

Scully pressed her lips together and focused her attention on rubbing ointment into the splits into the ugly gashes, pretending there was nothing else in the room. Pretending she couldn’t remember the way it felt to shred his flesh under her nails, that it didn’t feel _good_. Pretending she couldn’t see the plans for the rest of the group crystal-clear in her mind: a knife for Luna, a noose for Sage, a fall for Libby, the pond for Craig. And when she was done, she was to open her veins with a razor covered in Mulder’s blood.

She wrapped his wrists, winding one bandage around his palm to cover the scratches. She secured it and commanded him to stay still while she packed for them. She’d get ice from the freezer for the drive to keep the swelling down on his shoulder and…

“What’s your plan, Scully?” he asked as he followed her into the bedroom.

“We’re going home.” She tossed their suitcases on the bed and unzipped them at the same time, one in each hand.

“And what about everyone else?”

She tossed what few items they’d hung up in the closet on the bed. “We’ll leave a note.”

“Seriously?” He sounded pissed, but that was almost a relief. She could deal with his anger.

“Yes, seriously,” she shot back.

Mulder stood across the bed, catching her eye as she shoved her book under a pair of jeans. “You really think it’s a good idea leaving them here unprotected? After what happened?”

Scully stuffed the strewn clothing into their bags. “There’s no need to make a scene,” she said. “It’s over. I don’t…it’s over.”

The spirit was gone. The ugly weight she’d felt since she walked through those front doors, the distorting presence, it had vanished. And anyway, Scully herself was the real danger. Wasn’t that what they were trying to tell her all along? What they were whispering behind her back?

“How can you be sure?” he demanded.

“I just know.”

“_How_, Scully?”

She looked up at him finally. “I can’t explain it.”

Mulder sighed. He was looking at her again with worry and pity, and she missed his anger.

“I’m not leaving them here alone,” he said. “You can’t tell me you think it’s safe.”

She wanted to say they were all grown adults who made their own choices to be here, but she knew he was right. Still, she couldn’t look directly at Mulder. How was she supposed to stand before everyone else and tell them to leave?

“What are we going to tell them?” she said quietly.

“That’s what I’m asking you.”

It was the one question Scully couldn’t answer. She couldn’t make the words come out of her mouth. She opened her mouth and shut it. Her eyes started to prickle, and she felt a sudden, unjustified rage towards him for asking, for breaking her fragile composure.

“I’ll talk to Sage,” he said, resigned.

She nodded as she zipped up their bags.

Mulder moved closer.

“Hey,” he said.

Goddammit, Mulder. She couldn’t stand the tenderness in his voice. She willed him to be angry again. She wanted him to curse her for being prepared to leave their companions in a house of death. For being incapable of articulating her experience. After all, wasn’t that the real reason he’d never want her?

“It’s okay,” he said. “It’s gonna be okay.”

It wasn’t okay, nothing was fucking okay. She could still hear the ugly voice coming from her throat to reveal truths she’d hoped would never see the light of day.

She chewed at the worn lipstick.

Mulder tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. The loose, natural waves felt peculiar, and she wanted nothing more than to attack them with a round brush. She wanted desperately to look like herself again.

He brushed her cheek with his thumb, feather-light, like he was afraid the slightest pressure would break her.

The moment the tears came, he reached for her. She collapsed, sobbing into his chest, not caring that she was leaving mascara marks on his t-shirt. She cried for everything that happened that night and for everything that came before it. For the cracks that had opened into a chasm between them and the way he tucked her head under his chin like she belonged there.

She cried until the precise moment she didn’t need to cry any more.

In the bathroom, she washed away the last of the lipstick and dabbed at the makeup pooling under her eyes. She combed through her hair, though that did nothing to help the situation. Whatever. She was only four hours from her own apartment and its best feature: a shower that had yet to turn to blood.

She held out her hand and found it to be steady. 

She nodded at Mulder and steeled herself as they stepped into the hall. 

Mulder knocked lightly on Sage's door, opening it after a minute of silence. Sage was lying on her side, turned away from them. Scully was fairly sure Sage was sleeping naked.

“What’s going on?” Sage murmured. She pulled the comforter high on her chest as she turned to face them.

“We gotta get everyone out of here,” Mulder told her. “It’s not safe.”

Sage sat up, fully alert. “What happened?”

Mulder shook his head. “Don’t worry about that. Just…please, start packing up. This house is bad news.”

“Tell me what happened,” she demanded.

“It doesn’t matter.”

Sage started to stand, keeping the blanket wrapped around her. “That’s not for you to decide. You agreed to share any experiences.”

“We agreed to a lot more than you told us,” Mulder snapped.

“What are you talking about?” Sage asked dismissively, turning from them to pull a bathrobe around her body from under the blanket.

“You knew about Scully. She’s why you invited me. Isn’t that right?”

Scully and Sage both gave him baffled looks.

“You knew Price targets skeptics,” he went on. “That whole song and dance about thinking Scully was my gay lover.” He let out a unpleasant laugh. “You invited me because you knew I would bring her along, and she would be just the right for Nikola Price. A sacrificial offering. What exactly did you think was going to happen? Four fucking people died last time.”

“And what exactly did you think was going to happen?” Sage countered. “You knew people have died in this house. What were you hoping to see?”

Mulder’s fists were clenched by his sides.

Someone cleared their throat behind them, and they turned to see Libby in a t-shirt and boxer shorts, Luna in a silk robe. Libby cocked an eyebrow.

“We’re leaving,” Mulder told them. “Everyone’s leaving.”

“No, they’re not,” Sage argued. “That’s for me to decide, and we still have work to do.”

“Not anymore, you don’t. Pack your fucking bags.”

He tossed an empty suitcase at her. Sage stumbled as she caught it.

“What are you waiting for?” he demanded from the other women, who were looking at him like he’d lost his mind. Not that Scully could blame them.

“Craig,” Scully said, realizing it as she said it. Mulder looked at her, recognition on his face.

“Where's Craig?” Mulder asked the room.

“Asleep, probably?” Libby supplied. "Like we all were until you started shouting.”

“Exactly. Why didn’t he wake up, too?”

“He probably did, he just doesn't give a shit,” Libby retorted. 

Mulder ignored her. He didn’t bother knocking when he opened the door to Craig's bedroom. They found an empty bed and an empty bottle of bourbon the nightstand.

Without consulting each other, they hustled downstairs and to the atrium.

Before they reached it, Scully knew what they were going to find. 

In the center of the pond, Craig floated face down. The position of the body precisely matched the vision Price had planted in her brain. Her world tilted and righted itself as she concluded she couldn't have been responsible.

Painted in blood on the back of Mulder’s doppelgänger statue were four words: “I KILLED THEM ALL.”

Libby ran out from behind them, wading into the water before either of them could stop her. If anyone was to touch him and determine that he was dead, it should be herself or Mulder, not a civilian. But Libby was already up to her waist in the pond and reaching for him. She barely grazed his neck with her fingertips before jerking her hand back.

“He’s dead,” she said. “Like, _really_ dead.”

Scully wasn’t surprised. Death had a way of changing the air, and she could tell from where she was standing that there was no help for Craig. 

“Get out of there,” she instructed. “Don’t move him.”

“Don’t have to tell me twice,” Libby muttered, splashing back toward them, her face pale and stricken.

Mulder finished up with his call with the local authorities and pushed the antenna down on his cell phone before tucking it back in his pocket. He ordered everyone out of the atrium, out of the house. The five of them waited outside as the sun rose, casting away the fog and melting the frost. It was broad daylight before a beaten up patrol car showed up, followed by a rickety ambulance to cart Craig Donnelly’s body away.


	8. Chapter 8

Somewhere in Pennsylvania

Mulder was almost as relieved to pull away from the ratty motel as he was when the Price House first vanished from his sight. It had been a grueling day of redundant interviews and several promises to return to Pennsylvania if they ever needed for further questioning. The two cops that made up the Covencliff police department were uneasy about the prospect of holding a pair of FBI agents as they investigated the death of Craig Donnelly. They’d crashed at a motel that, much like the Price House, seemed like it hadn’t seen guests for decades. Scully had been so exhausted she’d fallen asleep fully dressed, managing only to kick off her shoes before passing out across the scratchy comforter. They woke before six with a mutual compulsion to get the hell out of Dodge. There were still miles of forest and several hours of driving ahead of them, but they were moving closer to home.

“Can you drop me off at Quantico?” Scully asked.

“Sure. What for?”

“A blood panel.” 

He eyed her. Her face was impassive, but her knuckles were white where she gripped the armrest on her door.

“Are you worried about the…you know, what happened in the shower?”

She shook her head. “I need them to test me for _Datura stramonium_ poisoning.”

“You think you were drugged?” He couldn’t help the hint of amusement that came out.

“It’s possible. There were plenty of opportunities to slip something in my food or drink. Symptoms of jimsonweed poisoning don’t present until around two hours after ingestion, and that fits the timeline.”

“And what symptoms were those, exactly?”

Scully didn’t answer. She twisted her mouth and drummed a nervous beat on the car door.

“If I recall, you said in higher doses it causes intense hallucinations indiscernible from reality. In lower doses, it has an aphrodisiac effect. So what are we talking, here?”

She shot him a dirty look. “Not a lower dose.”

“I’m just trying to understand what happened to you back there.”

“It doesn’t matter.” She sighed, leaning against the window and watching the gray blur of the forest as they sped past it. “It was all in my head.” Something about the way she said the words told him she didn’t quite believe that.

“What about the seance? I was there. I saw things.”

“How hard is it to pretend something is guiding your hand when you’re writing?”

“And everything else? The chairs?” He couldn’t hide his amusement.

“They could have been connected to wires with some automated mechanism.”

“And a propulsion system to slam us all back into place?”

Scully shrugged.

“What about the burning paper?”

“It could have had some kind of incendiary device on it. It was very dark. I couldn’t see much.”

“I suppose you’re also about to tell me it was a trick table, the thumping came from speakers hidden in the ceiling, and Sage found a way to intercept pump in pig’s blood through the pipes.”

“See, you saved me the trouble,” she agreed, humor in her voice.

They settled back into a comfortable silence. He could always count on her for comfortable silence.

As he drove, his mind returned inevitably to the promise she made, the one she pretended not to remember. He knew she’d given him an out, a reset button. To date, he’d always accepted those with relief and gratitude. But he didn’t want it. Not this time.

Her hand was resting on her thigh, and he covered it with his. She twitched a smile at him, but he could see a melancholic resignation in her eyes. Resigned to return to the status quo.

He needed to act. But when? Should he wait until they return to work, invite her on a proper date where they could loosen up with a bottle of wine? Wait until he couldn’t take it anymore and show up at her door in the middle of the night?

No, he didn’t like those options. He didn’t want to wait.

He didn’t _need_ to wait.

_He didn’t need to wait._ The thought made him giddy.

Mulder made up his mind, but it took time before he was able to act. Every mile toward the inevitable, every mile without a safe place to pull over the car, his heart beat faster, and he floated a little higher above his body.

He pulled his hand from Scully’s and yanked the car to the right the second he saw a turn-off. He braked too hard, jerking them forward and kicking up dust behind them.

“What the hell, Mulder?”

He barely registered her words. Hands on the steering wheel in a proper 10-2, he took a deep breath. Reminded himself that he was doing the right thing, the _only_ thing. He was doing what needed to be done, what he should have done years ago.

He turned to her. Her mouth was open like she was about to say something, but she didn’t. She inhaled softly when he cupped her head between his hands, her eyes widening with realization.

He closed the distance between them. Their lips fit together as perfectly as he remembered, only she wasn’t cold. She was warm as life itself, and the contact sent shimmers of pleasure through him. He could feel her desire through the way she pressed her mouth into his, the fingers on the back of his neck, thumb swiping at his jaw. But there was a plastic console between them, and it wasn’t enough. He wanted to feel her against his chest.

He pulled back and shook his head. “It’s not right,” he said.

He opened the driver’s seat door and slid out.

“What’s not right?” she asked in a hurt voice, as though anything about that kiss could have been wrong.

She was unbuckling her seatbelt as he opened the passenger door and held out his hand. She took it, regarding him with optimistic curiosity.

He tugged her upright, ignoring the pain in his wrists. He pulled her flush against him, one arm around her waist.

“Much better,” he said, looking down at her.

She gave him one of those radiant, closed-mouthed smiles. He decided to make it his mission to see it more often. He kissed her smile, feeling her lips melt against his.

When she pulled back, he groaned.

“Was that right?” she asked, the tip of her nose tickling his.

“Dunno. Lemme try again and find out.”

She giggled, and he wished he could bottle the sound.

When his mouth descended on hers, he found her open and waiting for him. She slid her hands under his jacket, grabbing at his shirt with her fists, pulling him closer until they toppled back against the car. He pushed her up to reach her easier without straining his neck. She responded by wrapping her legs around his waist and, shit, he hadn’t meant to press his erection against her. But she didn’t move away, and neither did he, and his arousal was a welcome presence between them. She gasped into his mouth as she tilted her hips to grind her center against the ridge of his cock. He had to stop himself from saying “holy shit” out loud.

His worst fears were realized. Consummating their relationship meant releasing a dam of all-consuming lust. All he wanted was to hear that little moan of pleasure, again and again, louder and louder. He never wanted to stop touching her. He wanted to take her right there against the car, to hell with the rest of the world. By the way she was kissing him back, she felt the same.

It was going to be distracting as hell.

Scully pulled back, looking at him, dazed. He took her in: wild hair, swollen lips, cheeks flushed a deep pink.

“We should probably…” she started to say.

“Yeah,” he agreed. “We should probably.” He bent to give her a quick, chaste kiss because he could. They did that now.

She clung to him as she lowered herself down, wobbling a little as she got her bearings.

“Shut up,” she said at his smirk. He couldn’t help himself.

Back in the car, Mulder had to force himself to keep his eyes on the road.

“I should be home from Quantico by eight,” she told him after a while, breaking a newly charged silence.

“Okay,” he replied simply, not sure why she was telling him that.

“Come over.” A statement, not a question, and no misinterpreting her meaning. There was a challenge in her eyes.

He opened his mouth to make a quip doubt how he’s not that easy, she’d need to wine and dine him first, but he thought better of it.

“I’ll be there,” he said.

“Good.”

Scully reclined back in her seat. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her touch her fingertips to her lips and smile.

On the long drive from Pennsylvania, she talked about the long and storied history of spiritualist charlatans with their mechanical moving tables, recorded knocking noises and paper mâché ectoplasm.

Mulder tried to pay attention, but he was distracted, thinking about making her come. Anyway, he knew most of it already. But that didn’t matter.

He just wanted to hear his woman talk.

* * *

“Can I ask you something?” Mulder asked from where he rested his head against Scully’s chest. 

His naked body was stretched against hers. Her toes reached only to his knees, but she loved being above him, cradling him. Her fingers danced from his soft hair down his neck to the lean muscles on his back, still damp with sweat. Her skin still tingled where he’d touched her, and he’d touched her everywhere. Mapping every corner of her skin with his hands and mouth, muttering about how she was beautiful and making little noises of recognition when he found a sweet spot. When he entered her for the first time, his look of revelation burned into her retinas. There had been no pain, even after two years of celibacy, and he was hardly a small man. She’d been ready for him, and he slid into her like he was coming home. He’d felt perfect.

She wanted to bask in the afterglow forever. She did not want him to ruin their post-coital bliss. There were countless questions he could ask, volumes of history better left unspoken.

“Okay.” She gave him a flirtatious smile, hoping he’d ask something light. _Scully, when did you start thinking of us this way? Was it what you imagined? Did years of watching me indulge my oral fixation adequately prepare you for good I am with my mouth?_

“Do you really think that blood test is going to come back positive?”

Oh.

As if to make up for the question, he stroked her stomach, looking up at her with those puppy dog eyes. She could be angry with him for breaking the spell, for letting the darkness leak back in, but it would be a while before she could muster any real anger toward Mulder. Her rage had deflated without effort like an air mattress with a pinhole.

She knew she didn’t have to answer. No one was easier to distract than a man getting laid for the first time in years, and she had a thousand new methods at her disposal for diverting a conversation. But the thought of using any of those methods left a bad taste in her mouth. If they were going to do this, really do this, she knew she would need to talk to him.

“No,” she admitted. “There were many symptoms I didn’t experience. Hyperthermia, severe mydriasis, muscle stiffness, tachycardia, paralysis. But I had them run a full panel for any drugs with psychoactive properties they could test for.” The words came out easily like she was explaining autopsy results.

“Do you think it will come back positive for anything else?”

“No,” she said, almost under her breath. “No, I don’t.”

He rewarded her for her honesty by taking her free hand and kissing her knuckles. When he met her eyes, his expression was grave. “Scully, what happened to you?”

She studied him, the man who’d more-or-less come to define her life, who inspired and infuriated her, whose seed she wiped from between her legs a few minutes ago. The man who approached her pleasure with the same methodical determination that he approached his work, who made her feel desired and cherished and safe. The man who pressed his lips to the hand that held a straight razor to his throat two nights ago.

She took a deep breath, and she told him.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the wonderful Julia, who gave me the word "summoning," season 6 or 7 and "UST, RST, fluff, angst, mutual pining." I didn't manage to work any fluff in, but I think I got the rest of 'em :) I hope you like it!


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